Gateway NV78 Insyde BIOS recovery filename? Hangs at BIOS splash screen

[33456tth]

I am working on a Gateway NV 78 laptop with a model number of KAYF0. It will not boot and hangs at the BIOS splash screen. It does this regardless of what comonents are connected. It is not locked up at the point, as you can press the ecs key and it will switch to the system info alternate screen. However, if you try to go into the BIOS, it hangs tring to go into the BIOS setup.

Supposendly, this issue arose when restarting the system after a Microsoft update, but I have doubts as to whether that has anything to do with it.

The board does function when pressing the BIOS recovery key combination of FN+Esc and tries to access a flash drive with a BIOS file on it, but apparently, the file names I have tried are not the correct one. I know you must have the correct recovery filename (with a ".fd" suffix) to get an Insyde to reflash the BIOS with a provided firmware file. Does anyone know what that filename is for the NV27, or anyone that can derive that filename from the BIOS on the Gateway site? I have not been able to find anyone at Gateway tech support that has any idea as to what I am taking about, even less what the file name is.

Also, if anyone knows what causes this with the NV27's and who has fixed it, short of a MB swap, that info would be greatly appreciated.

---Greg

[lmbarne]

Hello Greg,

I too have the Gateway NV78 and it's experiencing the same problem as yours. Were you ever able to find a solution? Thanks!

Lisa

[shoitz]

Hi Greg and Lisa,

I registered just to make this post, so I hope somebody's still listening! lol

I had the exact same problem, and after much digging I was able to solve it. Greg was on the right track (oh so close!), he just needed the right filename. Well for our laptop, the correct filename (or at least the one that worked for me) was: KAYF0X64.fd

Credit to Andy's tool over at My Digital Life Forums. I was able to download a BIOS file from Gateway, then analyze the .fd BIOS file with Andy's tool. It gave me the recovery file name. From there, the rest was (fairly) painless. Here's the quick notes I wrote up on the procedure -- hopefully it helps somebody (Google voyagers from the future perhaps):

I realize I'm late to the party, but I just went through figuring this thing out. Had to re-flash because of a corrupt BIOS. No disassembly required... If you have the same one as me then this should work (NV78 KAYF0 for me, also known as NV7802U or NV7802U-US). Download the latest BIOS from Gateway. Open the archive and find the *.FD file. Extract it to a USB flash drive. Rename it to KAYF0X64.fd (that's the BIOS recovery filename). Completely power down the laptop (remove battery, unplug, hold down power button while everything's disconnected for 10 seconds or so to discharge caps). Hold down Fn + ESC, plug the laptop back in, and power it on while still holding Fn + ESC. Fan will power on (display will show nothing) but if your flash drive has an LED on it you'll see that it's being accessed (flashing LED activity light). After 30-45 seconds or so it will shut back down. I waited 10 seconds or so, then disconnected the flash drive and rebooted. BIOS should be flashed! That is of course, if the emergency recovery feature wasn't disabled in the BIOS in the first place... (hopefully it wasn't!)

Let me know if I left out any important steps. If you're wondering why I would do this, symptoms were basically a corrupt BIOS -- laptop would boot to Gateway logo (and if you press ESC you'll get some additional text including BIOS version... for me it was 2.0.7). But it won't do anything more than that. If you press F2 to get into the BIOS, it will freeze while displaying the message indicating that it's going into the BIOS settings, but it will never get there. Once I re-flashed the BIOS (for me I used 2.0.8 but presumably any version should work. If not, I would recommend trying 2.0.8 like I did). Then I updated the BIOS to the latest version, feeling reasonably confident that I could recover if the flash went awry.

[Ryq]

I registered just to say thanks so very much! Over the last several months, I have seen countless posts on this issue with this laptop, but none were resolved. With your information, I was able to fix this issue in less than 15 minutes.

[shoitz]

Originally Posted by Ryq

I registered just to say thanks so very much! Over the last several months, I have seen countless posts on this issue with this laptop, but none were resolved. With your information, I was able to fix this issue in less than 15 minutes.

Glad it worked for you! I found the same thing... lots of people with the old BIOS somehow having been corrupted. It's too bad when it's such a simple fix, but the information is not out there (or in this case just hard to find). Once you have the right info, you can basically bring a useless laptop back to life.

[mwh]

Just registered to say thanks for posting your solution. It worked for me as well. I just walk my 65 year old mother throught the re-flash over the telephone in minutes! Thanks again.

[leolovely]

Thank you! You just saved me from having to go buy a new laptop this morning! I literally was able to follow your steps and I was back and running within 5 minutes.