OK, I need someone with an Inspiron 8500 equipped with a floppy drive and a Geforce 4 4200 Go card that has NOT been flashed to A03. Please email ryan.ewen@epcgaming.com or even better contact me on MSN with that same email address. With any luck someone will contact me tonight and within an hour I will have solved this whole problem. If only I thought of this a week ago, it's so simple, I've done it before with Radeon cards and it just never clicked in that I could do it with nVidia cards.

Using the floppy disk version of the Geforce 4 4200 Go BIOS updater, I have created my own floppy disk that backs up the current Geforce 4 4200 Go BIOS to a ROM file called REWEN.ROM. Once I can get someone to use my version of the update floppy disk to backup their non-A03 bios (risk free, nothing will be done to their video card) I will release a modified version of the Windows Geforce 4 4200 BIOS update program and another version of the Geforce 4 4200 BIOS update floppy disk, with the A01 or A02 Geforce 4 4200 Go BIOS.

SOMEONE CONTACT ME SOON!

 

rewen I hope you solve this problem. sorry i don't have the earlier version for you.

 

to bad i saw this thread before my update, spoke to dell.

dell told me that my OS is corrupt because of the bios flash(i laughed at him) then he told me that the hardware was not working(ran diagnostics before i called laughed at him again) told me to rollback driver(laughed even harder) then he told me he would have a box mailed to me so i can send it back for hardware repair.

Dell tech support is a joke

I just downloaded the 8600 driver and the line is gone. BTW the driver lists it for the 8500 and 8600. I hope it stays away till the bios gets fixed

I also called dell to tell them I'm not sending the computer back(afraid i will never see it again)

Thanks to Ryan ... this worked great for me as well ... I am just glad I hadn't had time to visit Mom and "upgrade" her drivers ... it would have been completed much sooner, but my mom is not a computer expert so it took a few hours to walk her through the process ... also she only has dial-up with an average connect speed of 33k ... Also the rev should be A02 ... her computer was purchased in late July. Again, a big thanks to Ryan.

Message Edited by volzalum on 09-14-2003 11:30 AM

Well, here's the solution! Thanx to Dax (volzalum) and his mom (who each have their own i8500's!) for helping me get the PreA03 BIOS!

(moved here: http://forums.us.dell.com/supportforums/board/message?board.id=insp_video&message.id=91085)

Message Edited by ReWeN on 09-14-2003 04:23 AM

Message Edited by ReWeN on 09-21-2003 11:49 PM

Actually you're the only person I've heard of who doesn't re-gain the bar after closing the lid with the A04 drivers... Everyone else I've seen post got the problem back temporarily after closing the lid or going into standby (with the A03 BIOS, not with PreA03 BIOS)...

Message Edited by ReWeN on 09-14-2003 08:35 PM

I updated all 3 of the files linked in my big post above. If you found that the floppy version of the PreA03 bios couldn't find the bios file to flash then re-download it and you should notice some minor updates ;)

Other than that I just reworded things such as A01/A02 to PreA03 and other stuff.

It worked! Thanks to ReWeN! The video BIOS looks exactly like the A02 version I had before, judging by the way the screen discolours when the system password screen appears at boot. nVidia Display properties says the BIOS version is 4.28.20.29.D1.

No disappearing cursor anymore after closing the laptop lid.

ReWeN,

I installed your "Backdate" update. Now is that an oxymoron or what :.
All is as it was, all is working, and I am about as appreciative as I can be, thanks.

Also I notice the time stamp on your posts and I have a couple of questions and statements:

1.What do you do for a living?
2.Do you ever sleep?
3.And how in Gods name did you "Hack this all into existence"? I am very sure that Dell did not give you the source code to their flash utilities.
   To put it mildly I am very impressed. I am a Controls Engineer and do what you did last night for a living. If my boss had asked for a time estimate
   for a similar task I would have answered "No guarantees, but best guess would be about one week".

Once again "Thank you very much"

ReWeN this is excellent work well done!! Ingenious.

If you do not have a floppy drive (like me) but would like to back up your current video bios first you should be able to use a bootable USB memory key instead. To make your memory key bootable, click here for instructions on how to install the operating system of your choice on it, or click here (my preference) to download a utility that will do it all automatically for you. Most new computers support booting from USB devices although you may need to enable it in the system BIOS.

Make a new folder on your memory key (e.g. \nVidia). Run ReWeN's backup creator for floppy drives and choose that folder as the destination to use for the backup utility.

Boot from your memory key. Navigate to the folder you made on it and run the autoexec.bat file ReWeN made. This worked for me.

...All I have to do now is upgrade (downgrade?!) to a functional video BIOS - fingers crossed!

I'm running the 29.D1 bios. Thanks Rewen. Will report back if I have further issues.

So why did I pay for CompleteCare when I'm getting a CompleteRunAround from Dell? Dell freaking s ucks!

Message Edited by knitterb on 09-14-2003 12:24 PM

Thanks ReWen!

We should demand a refund on our service packages and sign up for ReWen Complete Care.  Not only can you speak English but you also are familiar with Dell products and can fix them, something that Dell has proven they are incapable of.

ReWeN,

Thanks for taking the time to do this and figuring it out.  I am about to flash the video BIOS and will report back my results, including some of the OpenGL tests that i tried before that failed.

HolmanGT

1. I'm a 17 year old student who just got his first job 2 days ago at a computer store

2. I'm nocturnal on saturdays ;)

3. I've flashed a Radeon 9700 with 9700 Pro BIOS before (for overclocking), sometime during that I had to backup my Radeon BIOS just in case, so I knew that it could be done, and should work the same for nVidia cards.

After I noticed that there was a boot disk flasher (I really only noticed the windows one when I flashed A03 myself a week or 2 ago) I decided to look at the files that were put on the disk by Dell's program. One of them was NVFLASH.exe and there was the BIOS file with the extension .ROM. From previous experience with Windows 3.1, DOS, 95, 98, etc I knew that AUTOEXEC.bat was used to run the commands used on boot disks, so I looked at dell's AUTOEXEC.bat. Inside there was this line:

nvflash -u -f 4283110.rom

Although I was not sure what the tag "-u" did, it was fairly obvious that "-f" meant flash and that the "4283110.rom" was what to flash. So I went into my start menu and clicked Run. I ran cmd (a dos box) and there I typed..

A:\nvflash /?

Which gave me a nice list of commands for nvflash.exe, including a backup command "-b". I found that "-u" was something about overriding something (lol I forget now). I simply changed the line from AUTOEXEC.bat to..

nvflash -u -b BIOS_BACKUP.rom

..which would make the disk run nvflash.exe and make it save the BIOS back to the disk (I knew it was a small file so it would fit on the disk) as BIOS_BACKUP.rom. So now that I knew I could backup a BIOS, I just needed to do this on another computer that didn't have A03 BIOS flashed. In order to make this simple for that person I made a self executable zip file with the newly edited autoexec.bat, the nvflash.exe file, and any other files that didn't look famillar to a boot disk (I think it was just one other file with a name that started with C and had some numbers thrown around). All the other person would have to do was format a windows xp boot disk for which the instructions are placed right in the self-execuable zip file I made, and then use my self-executable zip file on the boot disk to make it a BIOS backup-er disk.

However this wasn't the first thing I tried. I actually tried just copying all the files from Dells boot disk to my self-execuable zip and then the person who did this for me wouldn't have to format a disk, but for whatever reason the disk wasn't bootable (and yes I got all hidden files, etc). I looked for a program that would make a custom boot disk but was unsuccessful, but it didnt' really matter. Making a winxp boot disk and overwriting the files with mine was still simple.

Now for flashing the new (or I guess old....) BIOS. This was the easiest part. I found that all I had to do was delete the rom file that came with the windows flasher, and put mine there instead. It didnt' even have to use the same name. The windows flasher found it and flashed it, no huss no fuss. Of course I made a self-execuable for it just because I like to make things simple.

Making the flasher floppy disk version was about the same as making the backup creator. I just changed the line in AUTOEXEC.bat and put my BIOS on the disk. The user needed to make a boot disk as instructed and then my program would overwrite a few files on it to make it a BIOS flashing disk

 

I hope that explains it all without confusing the heck out of you. In short it was a conbination of knowing how to use DOS utilites and making a boot disk :p

Message Edited by ReWeN on 09-14-2003 04:59 PM