Bios Will Not Flash

The flash utility has reported that the chipset/flashpart is not present. A second trip to the bios page revealed a different falsh utility than was listed in the manual. That was tried with the correct bios update file and the utility returned an error message that the flash file was not present. However, it was. I have used flash utilities dozens of times and never had a problem. A bios detection utility reported bios size as 256 kb. The specs at the mobo website give 2 MB. What is the problem here?