After Toshiba BIOS upgrade 5.10 Win 8.1 refuses to start

[alphanumeric]

Yeah. looks like you have to take the whole back off, that's a pain. My Wife's Acer is that way, even for just a hard drive swap. It has no quick access covers at all. My ASUS has one big access panel that gets access to the drives, RAM and WIFI.

 

[rick2k]

I have submitted a email support ticket with a description of the issue to Toshiba this evening linking to both this forum and Toshiba's own where people are reporting this issue.

I suspect anyone who has updated to 5.10 is experiencing these issues. If you don't have the know how or haven't searched the web I'm guessing there are some people out there with a large paperweight after the 5.10 BIOS update.

I'll keep everyone update on the response.

 

[rick2k]

Hi all.

I had no luck with contacting Toshiba support, they could not help me as I bought my machine from a retail shop Currys who provide support (I don't want to give me machine to them!)

I appear to have solved this myself though, and it has nothing to do with the Atheros WiFi all along... I accidentally found the fix while taking the machine apart.

See my post on the Toshiba forum post related to this issue here: https://forum.toshiba.eu/showthread...update-to-5-10&p=326899&viewfull=1#post326899

I hope this helps everyone with the issue.

-Ricky

 

[Gens]

Hi all.

I had no luck with contacting Toshiba support, they could not help me as I bought my machine from a retail shop Currys who provide support (I don't want to give me machine to them!)

I appear to have solved this myself though, and it has nothing to do with the Atheros WiFi all along... I accidentally found the fix while taking the machine apart.

See my post on the Toshiba forum post related to this issue here: https://forum.toshiba.eu/showthread...update-to-5-10&p=326899&viewfull=1#post326899

I hope this helps everyone with the issue.

-Ricky

I had exactly the same problem with my C55-B5202 (which shares the same BIOS as C50) and version 5.10 BIOS. I tried Rick's solution without success. Hitting F12 doesn't work on this machine, so I opened back cover and physically unplugged Qualcomm Atheros network card. Then computer started to boot.

I'm trying to downgrade BIOS to 1.70 now, but Toshiba's utility has version checking and won't let me so so. Does anyone have any idea how to downgrade BIOS?

 

[Gens]

Okay, I found a way to downgrade BIOS. I downloaded BIOS update utility directly from AMI and that one didn't have stupid version checking, so I was able to flash version 1.70 over 5.10. It's not as simple as it sounds (if you use default settings, you will fail), so be careful if you are doing this. Basically, you need to overwrite the whole BIOS, not just main block. I created a bootable USB stick with afudos.exe command on it and used it as follows.

afudos.exe BIOS.ROM /p /b /n /k

You can extract BIOS.ROM from Toshiba's BIOS update program scmlv170.exe.
NOW, MY PROBLEM IS GONE!!!!

I can boot into Windows 8.1 or Windows 10 without any problems. On both OS'es, I can see Qualcomm Atheros AR956x in Device Manager working fine and also confirmed that I can indeed use it to connect to wifi.

I have to conclude that Toshiba's BIOS version 5.10 has a bug. When I called their customer support, they tried very hard to convince me that my HDD is corrupted or I have other hardware issues and tried to charge me because my laptop was already out of warranty. Sigh.

Here is a proof that Qualcomm Atheros AR956x is working fine under Windows 10 on C55-B5202.

 

[Deme1982]

cannot extract bios.rom from executable from toshiba

Hello Gens,

I cannot extract the bios.rom file from version 1.70 from the exe file.
Is it possible you can send me this file?

Thanks in advance,

Dennis