BIOS Flash not working

[KachiWachi]

Recommended by Wim's BIOS...

[KachiWachi]

Yup...those are the strings I see now.

(MODBIN 4.50.60 crashed here too...)

So you think I can use UniFlash to update this guy? It seems to be able to want to...if I would let it...

What REALLY BOTHERS ME is that the utilities AOpen provides don't work.

As an aside, they do say if you have an EEPROM burner, just take the .BIN and burn with that. In essence, does that flash the entire chip, including the boot block...and is that what utilities such as UniFlash do (ie: turn your computer into a limited EEPROM burner)?

Did save the 2.20 BIOS with UniFlash...since the AOpen provided utilities don't appear to be able to do that (didn't recognize the chip), and the link to the latest AWARD v7.x flasher here seems broke...

[NickS]

KachiWachi wrote:

So you think I can use UniFlash to update this guy? It seems to be able to want to...if I would let it...

Well, I thnk you could try.

As an aside, they do say if you have an EEPROM burner, just take the .BIN and burn with that. In essence, does that flash the entire chip, including the boot block

Yes.

...and is that what utilities such as UniFlash do (ie: turn your computer into a limited EEPROM burner)?

Yes. Possibly with Uniflash I could have programmed a PLCC BIOS using the PLCC boot rom socket on my LAN card... I must ask Rainbow about that some time.

Did save the 2.20 BIOS with UniFlash...since the AOpen provided utilities don't appear to be able to do that (didn't recognize the chip), and the link to the latest AWARD v7.x flasher here seems broke...

Ah well, I'm sure you can find an Award flasher somewhere (such as http://www.soyousa.com/dl/bios/Awdflash.exe which must be fairly recent as it detects that I've got Windows 2000 and won't even give me help info in a DOS box).

[KachiWachi]

OK...

Got that AWARD flasher and it does detect the chip...so perhaps AOpen is not using the correct version??? Who knows...or cares at this point...lol.

All I guess I want to know now is about the Boot Block.

When I have flashed in the past, all I have done is typed *AWDFLASH xxx.BIN*, saved the original, then flashed. I see that there are many codes you can use to just perform certain functions (/? to show them). With no codes, is the default to write the Boot Block?

What is the Boot Block, and do you always need to flash it, and why/why not would you?

[NickS]

The boot block is an area of the Flash BIOS which does a basic functional check, checksums the BIOS ROM, decompresses it into RAM and passes control to the POST routine. To do this it needs to know about the chipset and the organisation of the flash ROM. I suggested some reasons why it might change earlier in this post.

I guess the default is not to write the bootblock, since it won't bother if it matches. If it doesn't match it will come up with a "Bootblock mismatch" error, IIRC.

[Rainbow]

Better flash it including the BootBlock if you know that the BIOS is correct one. If you don't it will most probably work too - but sometimes the old bootblock might be incompatible with the new BIOS (especially when the old BIOS runs in text mode and the new one in graphics mode) which results in dead board.

[KachiWachi]

I saw this in one of Rainbows other posts here...

"My favourite is Award BIOS which uses standard LZH compression to compress the blocks into single image, with simple bootblock at the end (which can initialize ISA VGA card and boot from floppy)."

I guess this is a safety...If the main BIOS code gets mangled, then at least you can boot from the floppy and restore your BIOS, without resorting to an EEPROM burner.

Did BIOS in the past have a bootblock, or was that unnecessary since back then EEPROMS did not exist and you needed to use a burner to program PROMS?

As for the AOpen, yes...they did change some functionality (if you read all the updates for the various versions) which could require writing a new bootblock...especially with this EZ-Restore feature they just released. I'm not going to try that for the moment, however...too new for me...let others find the bugs first

I still don't know why their BIOS Updaters won't see my BIOS chip. The only thing I can think of is for some strange reason, I might have one that they installed due to part shortages, etc... and it is not the one they *expect* to see there...

Can anyone look into their code and see which chips they expect to see?? Current version is 2.20...and as I mentioned I can't even load that.

Thanks!!

[KachiWachi]

I was looking today at the BIOS chip itself...seems there are 2 stickers on it...one over top of the other!!

My thinking that this guy may have a different, but still usable, Flash ROM in it seems to be holding more weight now. I can see some numbers undreneath that look like R2.101, but haven't found that number yet on the AOpen site.

I have e-mailed AOpen about this, and I'll let you know if/when I get a reply.

Feeling somewhat better now about this...