Blind flashing VBIOS

I got my VGA BIOS broken two days ago.
It was because of Winflash, which flashes VBIOS in windows.
First of all, NEVER USE WINFLASH.
I didn't read carefully about it's dangerousness.

Anyway, here is my story. And I hope this will help other people having the same problem.(But I hope no more disease like this happen to someone. NEVER USE WINFLASH)

When I first encountered this problem, I got blank screen on bootup.
There was no way to do something, because the laptop even doesn't recognized hard disk as well.

I asked here in the thread GX640 owners lounge, and people said it is impossible to recover by myself.

I also asked MSI technical support, and they replied me that I need to get AS. He said, since foreign MSI companies don't have BIOS writer, entire replacement of mainboard is required.

This was really a nightmare.
But I thought there might be a way because this is not a problem of BIOS, but VBIOS. So I tried to fix this by myself.

The reason why this was so hard work is, in fact the laptop doesn't go through posting process. But I found a trick. When the laptop starts to boot I hit numlock key repeatedly then sometimes it passed the posting. I checked this by responses of drives such as USB stick, hard disk.

I found that I can get into CMOS because after I made it to post and hit DEL key and then I hit F10+enter. Then it rebooted. So I was sure I can enter the CMOS.

Next step was to change boot priority because my setting was hard drive 1st. So I changed it by blind CMOS manipulation. I needed a key sequence to do that. Septimus_DSX helped me using CMOS screen images.(thank you Septimus_DSX)

And then I made a DOS-bootable CD and tried to boot on DOS.
The really hard stuff is that the laptop didn't always pass through posting process so I reboot again and again and tried by hitting keys. And moreover, it hung up very frequently during each step.

But finally I got a chance to get the DOS prompt!
I can check it because CD-ROM responses when I hit enter after any command. I went to C: drive and did atiflash.exe to recover my VBIOS.
I rebooted with no hope, but there was a miracle. I got the screen.
I'm writing this post right after I came back to windows on my laptop.

that's it. I made it.
I really didn't expect this is possible.
I spent two entire days, but I'm now so happy..

 

Nice work, +rep.

When I read your posts about this in some other thread, I was going to say that the notebook should post with a dead GPU, because my GT627 does (tested with a dead ATI 3870).

But since your notebook is completely different, I thought to myself that I better stay out of the convo.

Nice to see that MSI does things right.

EDIT: Can you please tell me the command you used with atiflash?

 

I did
atiflash.exe -p 0 br35701.030

yes the laptop should boot even with broken VBIOS.
but the situation was more complex.
I'm not 100% sure all other laptops can do this, but I think most of them can do.

 

+rep
Good job on bringing the bricked card back to life.

 

good work man.

 

Can you post a GPUz screenshot when you get a chance? Perhaps this has something to do with an onboard GPU present in your Arrendale chip?

In any case, I think you got very very lucky and it should not be taken by everybody as a license to brick their laptops for fun.

 

Here is my GPU-Z.


and you're right. my case is just very lucky one maybe.
I'm wondering how this problem will be on laptops which have switchable graphics feature.

 

I gave up after few days of trying to put my GPU to life in the same situation. I even went to trouble to ask my coleague to send purchase documents through half of Europe so that I was able to get it to repair center. Yet, it seems, the service center did a good job - they changed my GPU card and this one even runs cooler