Why to have DieHard BIOS Lite?
To most power users, the BIOS upgrade is a MUST-do job for maintaining their computer systems because the latest BIOS will always solve some minor or major motherboard problems. With a BIOS upgraded, not only will your system be able to gain noticeable enhancements, but your system will also gain support for the latest technology. At the same time, upgrading BIOS extends the useful life of your current PC, and therefore reduces your overall cost of ownership. However, a BIOS upgrade is still a concern for most of the users as they are afraid that any unexpected failures during the process of a BIOS upgrading will lead to disaster! In order to reduce the inconvenience caused by failed BIOS upgrade, we developed Die Hard BIOS, which contains 2nd BIOS on high-end motherboards. However, some old or economic standard motherboards do not implement this function.

Being a leading manufacturer in industrial circles, AOpen always provides complete solutions to our customer. For economic motherboard users, AOpen developed this DieHard BIOS Lite, an instant BIOS recovery function, which could help you to boot DOS-like environment. All AOpen latest motherboards are equipped with this easy and cost-saving BIOS recovery feature.

As long as your BIOS is still workable, you can always recover your BIOS back to the normal status, even though your BIOS is infected by a computer virus.

The principle of DieHard BIOS Lite.

DieHard BIOS Lite reserves an area of 16KB to 64KB (depends on different ROM types) for a tiny piece of code named "Boot Kernel". The Boot Kernel locates in a stand-alone area in BIOS ROM, which allows users to boot DOS-like environment and to recover BIOS in case of any unexpected situation happened during BIOS flashing. The Boot Kernel area is protected by special method; it will not be altered during normal BIOS flash process, hence the risk of a damaged Boot Kernel is very low.

If there's anything happened during the BIOS flash procedure (such as power failure during flash BIOS, wrong programming while writing to parameter blocks and virus attack), BIOS code can become corrupted, which will cause the system to go into an unbootable state. When the motherboard tries to boot but system turns up with the corrupted BIOS code, the DieHard BIOS Lite will then try to recover the BIOS code from floppy automatically. A black screen on power up may indicate BIOS ROM Checksum error, and the system will then attempt to recover BIOS code from diskette in drive A:

You may simply prepare a bootable diskette, save Award Flash utility and BIOS bin code in it. After rebooting with the bootable diskette, you can execute the DieHard BIOS Lite utility and so your BIOS will be fully recovered. The Boot Kernel will load in the BIOS code, and by the time you reboot PC again, the regular BIOS code should be in place and problem will be resolved. It's highly recommended that you must always prepare a bootable diskette, which contains DieHard BIOS Lite utility and BIOS bin in it.

You may need it in case of emergency.