I have a bizarrely borked ASUS board (M5A97 LE R2.0) that is stuck in a half way state between two BIOS versions. I cannot enter the BIOS settings page (the system locks up after drawing half of it). It will not POST if there are any USB devices or GPT partitioned disks attached. Removing those –and with some monkey business to get a keyboard– I am able to boot UBCD, so I do have access to a few tools.
I also setup a DOS boot disk using FreeDOS with the ASUSTeK BIOS Updater for DOS V1.30 and am able to find the CAP file from ASUS that should be the latest BIOS. Unfortunately when attempting to flash it it checks the file, then throws this error:
"Failed to load the secure BIOS."
I have been unable to figure out how to make this utility go or find a file that it likes. I've tried the latest 4 versions for this board posted on ASUS's site.
I also tried flashing using FTK, but it was unable to run in the FreeDOS environment I had setup. I also tried flashing from Linux using flashrom, but that failed for another undetermined reason.
What other options do I have for re-flashing this BIOS? What might the ASUSTeK utility not like about my ROM files?