I would have responded sooner but I have been forced back home with dialup for awhile and am resting up after a fun-filled exam week. Anyway, there are a number of tricks that will allow you to flash or know whether your card is flashable. I am a minimalist, so we will do both of these in the same step. Hopefully, I’ll write this up good enough that I can just transfer parts of this up to my guide. First I’ll answer some of your questions.
I would not recommend buying a pci gpu. It will not make your card any more flashable and it will only help if the bios is messing up (i.e. giving onscreen prompts for you to reply to but since you have no screen you cannot see the prompts). I have never seen a case of my gen2 bios doing something like this, but the bios does behave rather erratically with a corrupt eeprom.
Also, from doing all this stuff without nibitor before (i.e. editing in hex and making your own checksum), I’ve never seen a case of nvflash letting you flash a bios with an incorrect checksum, but I’ll take your word for it.
As for your system fans not starting, this could be because your bios is not even starting, an issue I will address later. Just beware that I purchased a broken card that caused the bios to boot only 25-40% of the time and the card ended up not being flashable.
You cannot hotswap the gpu’s but you likely won’t get hurt trying
(don’t try this at home).
Anyway, Buckle up.
I highly recommend you use the flash drive. They are very cheap and here is a link to some of them:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...nd&Order=PRICE . Some of my steps assume you use a flash drive such as mentioning the autoexec.bat instead of the autorun.bat. Also I mention deleting the autoexec after running your commands but if you use a cd then it is not writable in DOS.
First step first…Unplug your HD and remove all bootable media from your devices except the device you wish to boot to (i.e. remove cd from the dvd drive if you are planning on using the flash drive)
Your system is a M1710 and has bios customizable led’s which is perfect
This step requires you have access to another gpu unless you are super leet or already have your computer setup this way.
Go into the bios and set the system led’s to turn on upon bootup. This option is under “Onboard Devices” in my bios. Set the led’s to your favorite color
Make sure that whichever operating system you use by default, it either doesn’t have any fan control software (i.e. quickset) or it isn’t setup to automatically log in on bootup (i.e. your user account has a password). This last step isn’t really necessary but its convenient to know that your led settings will not be overridden upon bootup of the OS so you could walk away and come back and still know that the system was booted.
How is this helpful you ask? Well the system leds turn on when the bios is started and sometimes with a corrupt gpu, the bios will not start on every boot. The numlock led will turn on only after the system leds and can take up to 1.5 hr to turn on (mainly if you have flashed a bios that uses a different core than your original gpu).
The system led indicates when the bios is started and the numlock led indicates when a device is being booted (i.e. hard drive, flash drive, etc)
I have noticed on my system, that if the system leds don’t turn on within about 45 seconds of booting the system, they just aren’t gonna turn on and hence the system isn’t going to boot. If this happens, just perform a hard reboot and try again.
Once the system leds come on, just chill and wait for the numlock led to turn on.
When the numlock turns on, its only a matter of time before your media is booted and your autoexec is run.
Since you cannot see your screen, you are going to have to pipe the output of the commands. This simply redirects the output that would be shown on the screen to somewhere else, in our case a file. Therefore, your autoexec should look like this:
nvflash --list > output1.txt
nvflash -c > output2.txt
nvflash -r > output3.txt
nvflash -4 -5 -6 -A -y [bios].rom > output4.txt
These commands generate an output[1-4].txt that will allow you to know what’s happening without physically seeing the screen.
The first command is perhaps the most important. It lets you know whether nvflash recognizes your gpu as nvidia.
The second command checks for compatibility of your eeprom with the particular version of nvflash. Hence, the program may recognize your card as nvidia but still may not be able to tamper with it for sake of compatibility.
The third command will attempt to remove write protect from the card just in case it’s on for some reason.
The fourth command will attempt to force-auto flash and reboot the computer.
Note: If the fourth command did work, the computer would reboot and do everything over and over until you stopped it but in that case you’d have a fixed graphics card and what is there to worry about? Again though, this process should take you about 2-3 min unless you flashed a bios with a different core, in which case, I believe the bios starts instantaneously and you just have to wait for the numlock for about an hour and another 30 min to boot the device.
If any of the commands give an error, the output file will only show the version of nvflash used and nothing else. Anyway, report back here with your file outputs and I can try to assist you.
