Question NvFlash doesn't recognize my card: what to do?

[jhsachs]

I'm trying to reflash a Quadro display card's ROM with NvFlash, and it's not cooperating. I'm looking for insight into what is going wrong.

The card is an NVIDIA FX 5600. GPU-Z saved the existing VBIOS as QuadroFX5600.60.80.13.00.01.rom.

Windows 10 Device Manager correctly identified the card and installed driver version 342.01, but nvidia-smi would not run. Ubuntu 18.04 installed driver version 340.107, but afterward the display showed many errors: malformed letters, dialog boxes that should be opaque but were not, etc. (With the Nouveau driver everything displays correctly.) I believe the VBIOS may be defective or corrupted, and I hope that reflashing will fix it.

Before I go on, some context: this is a learning exercise. If I couldn't try to reflash this card, I would discard it. I would rather not brick it, but if I learn something useful and brick it in the process, I will consider the experiment a success.

Onward: I downloaded NvFlash 5.590.0 for Windows and the card's VBIOS version 60.80.1E.00.05 from TechPowerUp a few days ago.

I ran nvflash64 with the name of the new VBIOS file. It opened Windows's "...make changes to your device?" dialog. I clicked Yes. It opened a second command line window, displayed a short message, closed the window, and quit. Because the second window was open very briefly the message was hard to read, but I think it said "ERROR: No Nvidia display adapters found."

Again, this happened in a Windows 10 system that had already correctly identified the card.

 

[RememberThe5th]

I highly suggest you try to do it in DOS mode.(no windows premission or other "Eh".)
There are tutorials for it onto Techpowerup's site or youtube.

 

[jhsachs]

I used an MSDOS replacement that I could boot from a flash drive. FreeDOS, I believe, but I'd have to check to be sure. It never occurred to me that I could run the thing under Windows, or that it would be prudent to try!

 

[jhsachs]

As a postscript: I tried it in Windows's DOS mode on the chance that Windows provides some crucial service that FreeDOS doesn't. No difference.

 

[kanewolf]

I am thinking that an FX 5600 (launched in 2007) may be too old for a recent NVFlash executable.

 

[jhsachs]

I am thinking that an FX 5600 (launched in 2007) may be too old for a recent NVFlash executable.

That appears to be at least partly true. I tried a newer card (Tesla C2050) and nvflash64 had no trouble seeing it.

But I think the problem is more complex than that, or perhaps more random. After my original post I tried several other cards, and nvflash64 failed to recognize all of them. I'm sure that some were no older than the C2050. (As I write this the cards aren't accessible, so I can't say which ones I mean.)

This puts me in a quandary. I have several malfunctioning cards that I'd like to try reflashing, but they seem to fall into two groups: very expensive ones that I don't feel comfortable learning on, and less expensive ones that nvflash64 won't talk to.

Is there / was there an older flashing tool that would work with the older cards? That would be one path forward.