Hello: I recently tried to do a ram upgrade on an old Dell model 433/M 486 machine I got 2ndhand but after recognizing it and booting once, it no longer works. I now get an error message immediately when powering the system on that says "System BIOS damaged, reloading from diskette in Drive A...". I know I probably need a BIOS file, but where do I get it? DELL only has an automatic "exe flasher" program that does not work. When I try that the message persists, and nothing is loaded off the floppy. I'm guessing I need a raw "BIN" file (or some other special type" of the BIOS that will be able to be directly loaded from the disk when the computer is turned on? Or am I off base with my thinking, and the "exe" should work ok but is not because the chip itself is dead or something? Any help/suggestions you can provide me will be greatly appreciated. Thanks, Jeff

Try visiting www.badflash.com

some of the old big manufacture comps need a bios setup floppy to set up some of the items. i think that is your case , not a bios flash program. you will have to find it at dell.

Hello: Found my original problem, reason it wasn't loading was because the floppy drive was bad! Thought it was a working drive but discovered it was not when I installed it in another system yesterday. Now however I get a different error, now it does load the BIOS flash program but then says "unable to access ROM". That means the chip itself is bad doesn't it? Regards, Jeff

unable to access ROM". That means the chip itself is bad doesn't it? mybe not! Are you sure you have the correct flash program for your comp? They are not all the same! Some older comps do not use a flash program, the infor is on the hdd in a non dos partition. Some motherboards there is a jumper that must be changed,to permit writting to the bios. the error you get in first post "System BIOS damaged, reloading from diskette in Drive A" leads me to think the bios is on the hdd. can you boot useing a win98boot floppy? if so run fdisk select (y) for large disk support and then option #4. does it list a non dos partition? I dout you can :(

Thanks for the suggestions. No, I cannot boot at all, if I don't place a disk with a BIOS flash program in the FDD it just sits at the "BIOS damaged..."message until a disk with the BIOS on it is put in and it is powered on. I downloaded what DELL has listed for that system so I'm thinking it should be the correct one. You have me thinking though that perhaps there is a jumper I overlooked to let it write, I will have to check for that before I junk the machine. I found a chip yesterday that has "FLASH" written on it along with some other numbers, and what I believe was the old version of the BIOS (A05). So I'm thinking this chip is the BIOS chip. The version DELL had was A17, they didn't have anything older, could that be the problem? Thanks again for the suggestions. Jeff