How to: Recovering bios from bad update (Alienware Area 51 MS-7543 motherboard)
Few months ago I was feeling a little bit "unsatisfied" with my Alienware Area 51 desktop pc so I was trying to get a clue about in-bios overclocking features. Before doing anything I thought it was a great idea updating the bios to the last version first: I had version A11, I wanted to update to version A12. All I did was browsing Dell's website bios download sections and, once I thought I found the right version for my motherboard I downloaded it and successfully installed it: program said: "Installation was successful and computer needs to be restarted, do you want to restart it now?" I clicked "Yes" and *PUFF*, my pc was completely gone! When turning it on I just heard the sound of the fans but all I got were just black screens, even after several tries. I was pretty desperate because I had no clue what was really going on. After some googling I realized I made a bad update and since my motherboard doesn't feature BIOS automatic restore after bad update I just had to change the whole motherboard (different hundreds of dollars) or try some alternatives. I even tried to remove and re-put the CMOS battery, to press the "reset" buttons near the CMOS memory but black screens were the answer. This is a little introductory howto (I will be writing more detailed ones about each step), about manually putting a correct version of your bios back to your motherboard chip. You have to follow these steps:
Totally unplug your pc from power;
Press the power button for about 30 seconds (to avoid electrostatic charge);
Completely unplug pc components (CPUs, GPUs, soundcards etc.) from your motherboard (using wrist straps);
Completely unplug your motherboard from your case (always using wrist straps);
Once you've got the motherboard completely unplugged you have now to identify its BIOS chip, there are different kinds of them, this url (http://www.biosman.com/id_bios.html) may help you (it actually helped me). In my case the BIOS chip is a Macronix MX25L1605DM2i-12g;
Once you identified your chip there are different ways of removing it from your motherboard (in the worst case, even mine, you have to literally desolder it (there are a lot of tutorials on youtube on how to do that without permanently damaging chips) P.S. For every BIOS chip kind there are ways of removing them from your motherboard, so you have to google around to find a solution;
Once you have removed the chip you're finally ready to put your originally working BIOS, but how to do that? BIOS chips are, in a nutshell, memories, and they have pins that have to be linked to power supplies such as batteries or electrical components such as resistors or capacitors. You practically have to find the circuit scheme of your BIOS chip and plug it the serial port of an old computer (because modern ones don't have that port anymore). Scheme for my chip can be found here (http://html.alldatasheet.com/html-pdf/267910/MCNIX/MX25L1605DM2I-12G/990/6/MX25L1605DM2I-12G.html) and the image up in this post is the result;
Once you've correctly set everything up (never forget resistors and capacitors), you're finally able to make an interface between your circuit with the BIOS chip and a computer, by the serial port, but what else do we need?
First of all remember that almost every BIOS chip is powered up with a 3 Volt power source, a common battery etc. Moreover, you have to download a program called spipgm, just remember to download version 2.x.x because older ones might not support your BIOS chip yet;
Once you've plugged your circuit to the pc via the serial port you open spipgm2 and type all necessary commands (spipgm is available here: http://rayer.g6.cz/programm/spipgm.zip and I'll be soon writing a detailed post about its using);
To put your working BIOS back into your chip you have to exactly know what version of the BIOS was working on your pc when you had no problems, moreover you need a binary version of the BIOS, that is, a file with a .bin extension. Make sure you're really finding the right version, because otherwise you'll just be frustrated by failure.
If everything works you can finally put your BIOS back into your motherboard (in my case I had to re-solder it), and follow first 4-5 steps of this introductory howto backwords. If you did everything right you'll magically see a "resurrected" computer and you'll feel really proud of yourself.
This was just a general, introductory post, in next ones I will be roughly describing each hard step of the guide (desoldering the BIOS chip, making the little circuit, using spipgm etc.) so STAY TUNED!