-----Original Message-----

 > what damage can be done?

A lot... Resulting in a useless machine.

I just finished helping a friend who decided to flash his BIOS from a
Windows session instead of from a boot disk.  It made his computer
completely unusable. after the power lights came on, nothing happened, no
POST.

His only two real choices were to replace the BIOS chip with a new one *for
that motherboard and version* or to re-program the BIOS chip.  It is
difficult to find a replacement BIOS for some older motherboards.

Luckily we found the source code for his BIOS and I had a friend who had an
EPROM programmer. He replaced the messed up code and we got the machine
back working.  Remember that if you can't boot up, you can't re-flash the
bios and if the bios is messed up you can't boot!

Like the previous advice, unless you really need the functions or fixes in
a new bios version, don't do it.

Doug

                  Visit our website regularly for FAQs,
               articles, how-to's, tech tips and much more
                          http://freepctech.com