bios troubles

[Scoofy12]

I have an MSI K7T266 motherboard (Via KT266 chipset) that until recently has been happily running with an Athlon tbird 1.2G processor. i've got an XP2100 i'm looking to put on it.

So installed the hardware, cleared the bios, rebooted, and went into bios setup no problem. but when i rebooted, no post. no beeps, nothing on the screen, the diagnostic LEDs stuck on "processor initialization". so anytime i clear the bios, it boots (and gives a standard complaint about the bios having been cleared). i can "load bios defaults and continue" in which case it boots right up into the OS with no problem (albeit with a 100MHz fsb instead of 133), or i can go into the bios config. but no matter what settings i set (including just laoding the defaults, booting into the OS and then rebooting), once the bios has been configured, it won't boot until i clear it.

so i went to try to flash the bios to the latest version, but the AMI flash utility (both the DOS one an the NT one that comes with MSI's bios updater) complains that it doesnt support or doesnt recognize this particular flash chip, and wont flash it.

i see no reason this board shouldnt support the XP2100 (i have another KT266 board that does), and suspect that it would if i could get it flashed.

anyone have ideas on what to do, either to get it flashed, or what i might do without flashing?

[LAURENU2]

There are sometims differant flavors of the same CPU barton, palmieo, T bried.
That may be the cause it will not flash try it back with the old 1.2
Or swap the CPU from the MB that is working ok

GOOD Luck

[Scoofy12]

update:

after looking at all the bios updates, it does just need a flash to support this CPU. also i found that the reason the flash utilities complained was that by default the "bios protection" is on, so when i load the defaults when the machine boots, the bios is unflashable. who the hell thought that was a good idea?

actually, it probably is a good idea, but now i'm annoyed because i can't save any bios settings.

i was trying to avoid putting the the 1.2G back in there just because it's a pain, but i guess i'll do it anyway, i'm pretty sure that will work, as you said.