ASUS S400CA BIOS Upgrade-RAM doesn't work anymore

Question

I have an Asus S400CA laptop and today, I upgraded the BIOS firmware from version 203 to 209 using the Asus Windows flash utility. Flashing was successful and even the verification was OK. So, I restarted the system and ... just a black screen shows up. It doesn't even boot to BIOS anymore.

The S400 model has 4G RAM soldered on the motherboard and I have an extra 4G ram installed (so 8G in total). It was working fine before the BIOS upgrade but now when I removed the installed ram, it works fine, when I put it back, it stops working.

So, the problem is somehow about the mixture of the 209 version of BIOS and the extra RAM. In the description of the 209 it is written "support onboard memory". To me, it means they wanted to fix something but they ruined it.

I just wonder if anybody has a solution for it? One solution might be to downgrade the BIOS to an older version but I couldn't make it.

Answer 1

Ok, I fixed the issue by downgrading the BIOS back to version 203. Niether the WinFlash utility nor the EasyFlash can be used to downgrade the BIOS on new Asus laptops. I also used the DOS based AFUDOS utility and it also failed to downgrade the BIOS.

However the trick is very simple: run the WinFlash utility with /nodate switch from the command line. For more details see here.