Re: Asus A8N32-SLI (bios 0903) reports: 2288 MB out of 4096 MB usuable ? (Skybuck's Dream PC 2006)

Well this is what I did:

I made three floppies:

A red one (windows xp 64 bit startup disk, actually it's just a boot
disk)
A yellow one (to back up the old bios)
A green one (with new bios rom on it)

I reformatted all disks just to be sure they are readable. I think you
should do this before creating a bootdisk because windows will
otherwise perform a quick format when creating a bootdisk and that
might be bad.

I also forgot to place the afudos.exe (ami bios update tool) on the
bootdisk.

I also placed this file on the other two floppy disks.

You need three floppy disks because the ROM size is 1 MB. The manual
fails to mention this but ok.

The first time it went horrible. The yellow floppy disk was unreadable
? This might be caused because afudos wasn't on the red boot floppy
disk.

Anyway I noticed the file was missing so I went to windows xp 64 bit
and placed the afudos.exe on the red floppy. Then I booted again and
test time I tried it directly to the floppy... after reading the bios
it reported a write failure... not enough disk space.

So I tried a test to the second floppy this time it worked. I thought
to myself... maybe dos cached the afudos.exe so I did a fresh reboot.

Now comes the real deal.

This time I did a fresh reboot. Replaced the red boot disk with the
yellow bootdisk. I performed a bios backup test. That went well, I
deleted the TEST.ROM... now I backed up the bios to A8N0903.ROM that
went well.

I took out the disk and replaced it with the green floppy. I renamed
A8N321~3.ROM to A8N1103.ROM.

Then I flashed the bios.

So the whole process went as follows (a bit shorter but this is how it
should go):

1. Red floppy in (boot)
2. Red floppy out, yellow floppy in. (backup)
3. afudos /oA8N0903.ROM (bios backed up)
4. Yellow floppy out, green floppy in. (new bios)
5. afudos /iA8N1103.ROM (bios flashed)

I could not use control-alt-delete to reboot so I simply pressed the
reset button.

I followed the manual instructions and let windows boot from harddisk.

Before I could do that a warning and a choice came on the screen:

"CMOS Checksum failure" or something like that.

What is this ?

The manual does not mention it.

I think this probably has to do with the settings of the bios which are
now resetted so that could explain.

I choose "load default settings and continue".

Windows xp 64 bit booted etc.

I checked the system settings and I could have sworn that it said: "3.3
GB of RAM" available. (I also could have sworn that the boot screen
displayed 3.3 RAM checked as well or something like that)

I was excited and wanted to go back into the bios menu so I restarted
the system.

I noticed that windows xp played the shutdown song real fast I never
noticed that before so I am not sure if it's normal.

Anyway I went back into the bios and went to the system information
tab.

There it still said: 2288 MB ram usuable...

I was like huh ?

So I rebooted again into windows xp 64 bit.

And now I still have 2288 MB available ?

How strange is that !?

Maybe if I shutdown the power it will be better...

Or maybe it's a windows xp 64 bit issue ?

Or maybe I was just dreaming ????????????? huh ?

To be continued I guess.

I am not going to flash the bios with the same version again that's for
sure ;)

The bios version says 1103 so that's good.

However the menu software is still at 02.58

Bye,
Skybuck.

.