Radeon HD 3870 X2, flashing BIOS and made a huge mistake? - 2008/05/19 03:07Hi all, I completely messed up when flashing my Radeon HD 3870 X2 reference design graphics card. Is there anyone who has the time and/or knowledge to help me? What I really need is the files to go on a bootable floppy which will blind flash and force the X2 and hopefully get it up and running again. Any help would be hugely appreciated.
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DarkFox
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Re:Radeon HD 3870 X2, flashing BIOS and made a huge mistake? - 2008/05/19 03:47Do you have the original BIOS's? You won't be getting far without it. I'm not entirely sure how you flash the two BIOS's on the Radeon HD 3870 X2, it may not be simply flashing as though you had two separate cards, so I'll let somebody who is sure tell you what needs to go in the "autoexec.bat" file. Now that I think about it, I don't think it actually has two BIOS's since it's just one PCB...
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Choc
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Re:Radeon HD 3870 X2, flashing BIOS and made a huge mistake? - 2008/05/19 04:08There is a BIOS for each GPU. That's actually where I think I might have gone a bit wrong. Maybe flashed the wrong way around. Don't really know for sure.
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DarkFox
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Re:Radeon HD 3870 X2, flashing BIOS and made a huge mistake? - 2008/05/19 06:07Ah okay then, well if I were to take an educated guess, I would have the following code in the "autoexec.bat" file. That assumes you have the original BIOS's, and that both BIOS's were originally the same, otherwise use the correct BIOS file for each. I'm not sure if you can run both lines in the one batch file and have it work properly since I've never had two cards to try it.
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Mavke
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Re:Radeon HD 3870 X2, flashing BIOS and made a huge mistake? - 2008/05/19 19:33Hehe, well that is what I warned some time ago for and seems not that much attention is paid to that remark and that is causing of course that the cards don't work anymore. And indeed the Radeon HD 3780 X2 has just one PCB but these are actually two PCB put together in one PCB and each GPU has its own BIOS with one being the master and the other the slave and that is why they are different and have a different size as well. And if you flash em wrongly your card becomes useless...
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Choc
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Re:Radeon HD 3870 X2, flashing BIOS and made a huge mistake? - 2008/05/19 23:34So there is no way to blind flash the graphics back to life then? Any attempt wouldn't work, cause I thought I should be able to reflash?
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Mavke
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Re:Radeon HD 3870 X2, flashing BIOS and made a huge mistake? - 2008/05/20 11:12Choc wrote: So there is no way to blind flash the graphics back to life then? Any attempt wouldn't work, cause I thought I should be able to reflash? You should be able to flash, though if you don't know which BIOS belongs to which GPU you will just not be able to pull it off and on that aspect there is little we can do. So do you know that and do you have a copy of the original BIOS's of your graphics card? Cause that is quite essential...
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Choc
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Re:Radeon HD 3870 X2, flashing BIOS and made a huge mistake? - 2008/05/21 02:50Yes... I have a master and a slave BIOS. The master is 42kb, the slave 62kb. So what I need now is to know what I should put on the floppy disk apart from the boot files. Also, if the master BIOS is called "m.bin" and the slave "s.bin", what should the blind flash command file look like?
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Mavke
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Re:Radeon HD 3870 X2, flashing BIOS and made a huge mistake? - 2008/05/21 17:05Okay cool, that is already a start. Can you share with us those BIOS files by just zipping these up and attaching on this thread. And then can you detail which brand of Radeon HD 3870 X2 card you have? Like PowerColor, GeCube, etc? Than we can check and see which are the two flash commands you need to make sure you flash the master BIOS to the master GPU, and vice versa.
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Choc
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Re:Radeon HD 3870 X2, flashing BIOS and made a huge mistake? - 2008/05/21 17:33Hi, I had the BIOS because luckily my friend has an identical card... They were a store brand version of the X2 which an online store did at launch time. Basically an OEM card with generic branding. The GPU-Z info lists the card as device ID 1002-950F and subvendor ATI (1002). ATI Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB Dual-GPU Edition - Memory : 1024MB - Bus Type : PCI Express
Galaxy 9800GT PCIe 512MB - Rev 01
