Alright, my IBM 45 gigger started acting up a little (heads crashed when I tried to read data from my last partition). I got tired of RMAing the damn thing (this would be #2 from IBM thats failed...which sucks too cuz it was a damn good drive) so I grabbed the sunday paper and yanked out the usual ads from places like Best Buy, Office Depot, etc. I spotted a Maxtor 160GB drive (with the 8MB cache of course) for $99 after rebates ($40 mail-in rebate + $30 instant rebate) from Office Depot. I decided to be even more frugal and take the ad to Best Buy and save myself an additional 10%. What I didn't know at the time was that its 10% of the DIFFERENCE, not off the other store's price....so I only saved myself $2. (if I had known that, I would've just gone to Office Depot and saved myself a little gas) Anyways, after a little negotiations (basically, they bitched at how they couldn't honor the after-rebate price even though down in the fine print it had the before rebate price....which was still cheaper than what they wanted for it.) I got the drive for $139 (before the $40 mail-in rebate). I went home and backed up what data I could off of the 45 gigger onto a space 10 gig that I used for backups. (basically, I got everything except the winamp skin I was working on and some mp3s I already have on CD) Then I partitioned the drive (didn't notice at the time that my Asus A7V maxed out at 128GB) and installed XP. I noticed the 128GB cap and kicked myself for not noticing it earlier. I went to Asus' site and noticed that the 1011 bios fixed this glitch and promptly downloaded it. I grabbed a DOS boot floppy and went to update my BIOS. I "successfully" flashed it and rebooted my PC.....big mistake. I grabbed a wire and shorted the spot on the board where the clear BIOS jumper was supposed to have been soldered in. No dice. Turns out the damn EEPROM got FRIED.
The next day, I hopped on a terminal and started scouring the net for similar instances. Turns out theres a glitch where if you don't turn off "Byte Merge", the flash will say it was successful even though it wasn't and take out your BIOS. Most of them were instances where the BIOS was just corrupted, but I found a couple where the chip itself was toasted. This problem is NOT documented in the A7V manual, and Asus flat out DENIES it even exists! Thanks alot Asus. 
I've got a perfectly good board with no BIOS. I went around looking for a place willing to sell one individually. The only place I found wanted $50 for one, and wouldn't flash it for me. Take a wild guess what I said.I got tired of this so I hopped on newegg and finally ordered that mobo I wanted, and nabbed a 256MB stick of PC2700 while I was there (Corsair is the manf of the stick). Three days later, it showed up. I promptly popped my Duron 700 and DDR stick into the board and installed it. Damn thing wouldn't POST. I was PISSED. I didn't have time to mess with it since I had to goto a wedding the next day (and would be gone all weekend). I got back and popped the battery (wierdest damn setup for the battery I've ever seen. Damn thing is perpindicular to the mobo instead of mounted horizontally on it.) and shorted the clear BIOS jumper. Worked like a champ. I repartitioned my 160GB so that I could use all the space on it, and re-installed XP. I let it run all night downloading all 42MB worth of updates. (would've been ~70MB if I didn't already have Media Player 9 and DX9.0b on CD) I just finished installing the updates for NSW2003. Now to reboot and install my shiznit....
This is why I haven't been on ICQ or posting here for the last two weeks...
