Strange BIOS behavior

I tried to flash my bios on my P4P800 - VM board to bios version 1.16
to be able to support the CT-479 adapter. After trying to figure out
which version of BIOS I needed at asus.com I thought that an upgrade
to 1.08 was necessary before I could flash to 1.16. The first flash
went ok, but when making the second one to version 1.16, the screen
went blank. Since I didn?t know any better I turned the power off and
that bios chip was dead. After searching the net for any tips on how
to reprogram the chip I stumbled on a method that seemed a good one. I
got another identical board which I booted up inte dos "hot swapped"
the bios-chips and reprogrammed the blank/corrupted one. This kind of
worked.

Now I can start up with the previously bad chip, but I?m not able to
save any settings to the CMOS. I get the same error as a couple of
other people in this forum. CMOS settings wrong and time/date not set.
And any and all changes I make are gone at the next bootup.

I might also add that the first flashes were totally unneccasary too,
in my haste I mistook board revision for BIOS revision. And I flashed
from 1.16 to 1.08 and back to 1.16 again. What I find strange with the
now "working" chip is that the same errors occurs on both
motherboards when I use that chip, which leads me to belive that it is
something in the chip that is wrong. I thought that when I was
flashing a chip I reprogrammed it completly. Since the verification
after the flash said all ok I cant understand what is wrong. Might
there be some areas of the BIOS chip that are unaffected by a flash
that is causing this error?

I can?t figure this one out for myself so I?m asking for your help.
Does anyone know what can be causing this behavior. The board was out
of the box new and I have no additional hardware installed. Only a
floppy drive to flash from. And as far as I can tell the chip itself
is physically undamaged, I took ESD precautions and was very careful
when taking it out using proper tools. All help or tips are welcome.

Thanks in advance
Tyrfing


After some more experimenting I remembered what I did just before the
board initially died. The second flash went kind of ok too, but I
couldn?t save to CMOS after that. Therefore I tried the
recoveryfunction of the utilities cd that was shipped with the board.
The BIOS on that cd was what made it die. Not the upgrade from 1.08 ->
1.16 though that made the chip unable to store any changes. Too bad I
had to make the same thing twice to remeber what I did.

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