BIOS Updates forum

Flash devices have a write life of 15,000 writes and then they die, That was the old rule. Flash was based on Dr Andy Groove of Intel's patent. His invention uses doped silicon dioxide to flow or anneal the stressed cmos gates. But, in shrink the dimensions to submicron rules, the annealing process ...

If you have another computer to burn a cdr to boot and flash the bios rom(4 mb flash not eeprom) with the original bios, you maybe able to recover. Remeber, the flash bios rom has to be warmed up first, so that the transistors are at the correct speed. Otherwise there will be errors. The cdr has to ...

4 mb flash(not eeprom) bios rom needs to be warm when you flash. Otherwise you can easily get errors and corruption. Flash transistor speed changes with temperature. It has bootblock loader. So when you turn on and warm up the motherboard, you can see the floppy light stayed on. If you have a new bi...

What is your mini post card reading?

88,FF or 00, usually means your chipset I/O is dead(usually due to dicing saw damage on the silicon chip, or the silicon chip is actually broken, even though there is no shorts). Throw your motherboard out, savage only anything that comes off the motherboard.

Motherboards die for many reasons, mostly thermal stress on warped ATX motherboards. If you leave the motherboards on, never turn off; it lasts longer, but your hDD dies due to bearing failure(8000 hours mean time between failure or 4 years). I am for Linux livecd with USB drives, where nothing will...

Win2k and WinNT has better dos commands then 98 and ME?

I would get a mini post card, from ebay if necessary and check the motherboard posting first with everything the way it is. Then you will know if the motherboard failed for any reason?

Since I program flash and eeproms etc., and I fix motherboards to do research on semiconductor failures; I can tell you that 99% of board failures or card failures are not rom problems. The problem is mostly chips got too hot, due to moisture absorbtion in the plastic package, or the stress due to d...

The eeprom or flash roms(DIP) have a loader which starts the floppy to write the bios file, without any operating system. On 4 mb flash, you have a jumper to set. So, if the bios can not boot, the loader starts the floppy and floppy light will be on for you to insert the disk to start to flash again...

Is it Ansi?

Ajz; I had done extensive research on Pcchips motherboards manufactured in 1999 up to 2001. Many thanks to your work in providing info not known to me at that time. I have kept one M748Lmrt with the latest Amptron drivers. Only the serial port was damaged because of pushing the adaptor too hard in t...

As I said, Roms are tough. I have programmed many a flash, eeprom and eproms. Hotplug them on non native motherboards just to flash. Flash are made with buffers, so they are not too easily destroyed. The problem is generally, that the new bios does not fit your motherboard version number. Before fla...

Are you using the same cpu? Same cpu stepping? Even though chipsets are the same; 586 is slower than 686, due to extra instructions in 686? Later rev. chipset may not be used to its fullest? Then, EDO and sdram sometimes were mixed on those motherboards, wait state assignment might be different? Are...

Are you working with 1 mb roms? You are having all the fun. Since bios is shadowed, you can patch in the shadowed dram area, even changed dynamically much easier and logical too. I have suggested to Bill Gates a few years back; that they should do the dynamic adjustments to run the cpu at overclocke...

I believe you can always reflash it back to the original bios, if the floppy light comes on again? Roms are pretty tough, I started hotplug them many years ago. There are troublesome ones which are faster than 90 ns(like 45 ns). I like to use 120 or even 150 ns flash. Once it is shadowed, nobody kno...