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I have an Asus K55A notebook with something that seems to be a bricked BIOS, after a failed flash attempt while using their damn Asus Flash Utility in Win7 X64.(A tool which is actually incapable of writing the new BIOS into the flash area while running an X64 OS!)

It had however saved the original BIOS 404 to a hard drive as a hidden file on the root folder. I wanted the BIOS 407 version in order for my machine to properly detect 12GB or 16GB of RAM. Also my Core I5 based machine was unable to properly fast boot without the UEFI CSM option enabled in the BIOS.It would loop continuously into BIOS after restarting with BIOS 404 and no UEFI CSM mode enabled.

The motherboard revision is K55VD rev 3.1.

With the PXE option disabled in the BIOS which means no USB3 DOS mode support one of my ADATA USB 3.0 sticks would disconnect randomly, while the other two were working well.

Is there any possibility to reflash the BIOS in DOS mode using some sort of USB Flash Recovery Utility like the one that HP has, namely the HP USB Recovery Flash Disk Utility?

Does Asus have any similar USB flash recovery bootable software solution?

Why is the HP Recovery tool not installing to the USB stick in Windows 7 X64?

It does power up but nothing appears on the display.I already tried any key combination, resetting the CMOS battery, Ctrl+Home+Power, ALT+F2, ... no luck and still no image on the display.

I was afraid to use the Asus internal EZ Flash program even though it was seeing the correct version of the newer BIOS 407 because it would not save the original BIOS, somebody working for Asus told me to update using their Windows based flash utility, and that proved to be a total disaster and a big mistake, after three complete erase/write loops, it gave me a blue screen while erasing for a forth time and my machine was gone.

Should I take it to an Asus certified repair laptop service?

Is it possible to flash the soldered BIOS by connecting a set of specialized pliers with many specialized connectors to an external programmer in order to flash the correct BIOS?

There are only two certified Asus repair shops in my area and both are 50 miles away from my location.

Please help me!

Any suggestions are welcome and highly appreciated!

Thank you very much!

Michael
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  • It seems like you are asking many questions at once. Your problem might require more information and discussion than is suitable for a question/answer format. I would suggest getting the professional help or asking on a specialized hardware/Windows forum. – MC10 Aug 04 '15 at 22:51
  • You will have to send it to Asus, there are no crisis recovery tools available. – Moab Aug 04 '15 at 23:01

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So.. my experience came from a K53BE laptop, and I really didn't feel compelled writing anything about such dreadfulness, but comments here seem wrong enough that I think some clarification is needed. There shouldn't be any important difference from your case, given the systems have more or less the same age (~2012) and technology (AMI Aptio4).

So, first of all: I believe the most important thing is checking if LEDs are still left working.

If they correctly respond to power on/off and AC plugging, chances are the most basic functionality is still there. HDD access light should also blink every now and then. Otherwise if nothing comes alive (short of a shy fan, if any)... I'd really start looking for an SPI programmer.

Alternatively, if you happen to have an usb key with a built-in "activity lighting", you could try to see if when connected on boot it blinks.

Regardless of leds though, we are gonna need an MBR FAT32 one (size shouldn't matter, mine was 64GB) with the official bios image inside. There's plenty of mystery around the name you should give to such file, I for one had: amiboot, K43BE (the "genitor" of my laptop family, after which my bios image was actually named on asus website) and VRL50 (the motherboard part number, acronym also found in bios image itself). All of them both in a .bin and .rom fashion.

Then, I'm going to list scrupulously what I did afterwards, but I have no pretense or knowledge of this having been strictly necessary:

  • Remove the hard disk(s)

  • Unplug the pc from charge (battery should be left connected)

  • Wait ~5 minutes

  • Insert the usb key in a 2.0, non-header, port

  • Press RightControl and Home⇱ on the keyboard

  • Power on, while keeping pressed down these buttons

  • Reconnect AC power, while keeping pressed down the buttons

  • After some amount of time that shouldn't exceed the minute, display should first flicker, then finally power on (and just when this occurs you should let go buttons).

Eventually asus firmware should take care of the remainder part of the recovery procedure.

EDIT: crash recovery may also require different special keys such as Alt+F2, or F11. While other times, for as much the dead display, it could even be you can still boot normally from disks. YMMV.

EDIT2: the same procedure is still confirmed to work on much newer Aptio V asus latops (also showing that probably I may have been a bit overzealous in my instructions)

mirh
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