A very important warning to anyone with an Asus board - particularly Baron, as I know it has the same "feature"
One of the selling points of recent Asus boards is the ability to put your own boot logo on. This sounded like a good idea at the time.
The manual has practically no information (one paragraph of bumf), and on installing the app you don't get any either. Opening the app launches a dialog based interface with no help which gets you to pick a bios file, then a picture, then creates the modified bios.
It doesn't even tell you what resolution image to use until you get to that stage.
But I made an image and fed it in. It went through the process and created a bios, no problem, no feedback beyond what filename it had backed the original bios file up to.
So I go into the in-BIOS flash utility and flash the bios.
Reboot and cool, there's my logo. Colours aren't great, needs some tweaking.
Hang on, shouldn't the machine be actually booting now?
After much resetting clearing the CMOS I turned to the internet. Google returned a slew of unhelpful results, but also this.
If the image is over 150k, it will cause the bios to be too big to flash. MyLogo3 doesn't bother to check, or warn you. The built in flash tool doesn't mention the trifling matter that the BIOS is too big to fit in the fucking chip. It even verifies what did fit, says all is well and automatically reboots your machine into a fucked state.
I found this out a few hours ago. I had to go and do something else for that long to calm down enough to even think about it again. I lack the words to describe how angry I was at the time.
I'll be ringing tech support tommorrow and they had better just swap the damn thing out when I go in this friday.
Don't even consider using this thing. In fact, I'd strongly reccomend you don't use anything that modifies a bios file, or any Asus "utility".
Comments
Bloody hell. That's ridiculous.
I'd post this up all over the web and if you get no joy, then go to the Trading Standards.
Noted. Thanks for the heads up!
Bryn, you might was to google around Asus CrashFree. (basically, Asus mobos can recover from a completely hosed bios through cunning use of a correctly set up floppy or USB drive.)
I guess you might not feel like going to the effort, but my feeling would be that it at least stands a chance of being quicker and more satisfactory than having to do a mobo swap-out.
The other option is that Asus mobos usually have a socketed BIOS chip; you might be able to harangue them into just sending you another. Or, if you can find someone else with the same board, you could use theirs to boot, then swap yours back in and re-flash it.
Oh, and obviously assume a hefty dose of outrage and mately support about their bullshit utility and documentation.
That is really crap
Cheers all.
Nice one Will, having a look now.
Hm. I suspect that the problem is that the Crashfree system only kicks in when the bios is known to be corrupt, by checksum.
Unfortunately it would seem that one of the few things that MyLogo3 does correctly is to compute a checksum for the damn thing.
Trying a few hours without bios battery, although I suspect this will achieve little - I've loaded cmos defaults a number of times already using the handy button on the back panel..
Any more joy last night?