I’m posting this for any of you unfortunate enough to have an ASUS EEE PC 900 Linux with bios version 802.
I snagged one on eBay for $30 figuring I could repair it with parts I had on hand and load Windows XP on it. But 802 bios does not recognize SATA drives and so XP would not boot from my new 64 gb SATA SSD. So a bios update was required and everyone agrees 1006 is the way to go. The problem was when I went to flash the bios nothing worked.
ASUS apparently forgot they made millions of these and no support is available for anything prior to the 900HD.
I tried ALT + F2 when booting up to the ASUS screen and the computer just went into Bios Setup.
There is no EZ Flash tool in the Bios anywhere.
I tried formatting a USB key to FAT and renaming the update to 900.ROM and booting up with that in the left USB port – it ignored it.
I tried ASUS Updater but it said it couldn’t read the Bios image
I tried AFUWIN flash app and it couldn’t find the image
I made a bootable USB key with Freedos and Win32 Disk Imager and tried AFUDOS. Freedos ran fine but
I tried every version of AFUDOS 3.5 and up and got the same result: Can’t find the bios files.
I went to American Megatrends AMI.com website and downloaded and tried every bios flasher version they had over a 3 day period. All basically errored out on can’t find bios image or ‘bios does not support AFU’
I tried BUPDATER and got the error CANNOT FIND UPDATE MODULE
I went here http://www.bios-mods.com/ and found some great info but no solution.
I was about to give up and live with a workaround but just before I went to sleep after an all day session I found a post mentioning a very old version of AFUDOS 2.36
I downloaded from here http://pcdriverupdates.com/download.php?link=asus-cm5425-desktop-pc-bios-utilities-driver-dos&model=NTI4ODM=&id=MzczMjE3Nw==
You can also get it here:
http://www.downloadexpo.com/drivers/bios/asus/download-asus-p5b-e-plus-afudos-bios-update-tool_4030.html
I loaded AFU236U on my Freedos USB key and typed in:
afu236u /i900.ROM /o802.ROM
and IT WORKED!!!!
My bios is now version 1006 and Win XP boots up normally and very fast. I can only imagine this EEE PC 900 was an early version and didn’t have the built in bios flasher and that AFUDOS 2.36 is early version to recognize this PC.
