AM29F040B, Uniflash and an ASus p2B

Discusses BIOS flashers and utilities from Award, AMI and Uniflash
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biosAtom
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Hi;

I am trying to hot-flash an AM29F040 in and Asus P2B. Both uniflash and amniflash fail saying they can not detect the chip and that it may be write protected? I do not see any jumpers on the board to enable writing and I have disabled virus protection in the bios setup features. Is it even possible to flash this chip in this board? I have tried it in another 'unkown' Tyan motherboard and get the same errors. This chip is brand new and the board is fully funtional.

any ideas?
Rainbow
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The AMD29F040 is 512KB chip. I have one too and I've not seen yet any board that can flash it. Most boards with DIP sockets support only 256KB or 128KB chips.
Patched and tested BIOSes are at http://wims.rainbow-software.org
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biosAtom
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Rainbow wrote:The AMD29F040 is 512KB chip. I have one too and I've not seen yet any board that can flash it. Most boards with DIP sockets support only 256KB or 128KB chips.


Thanks. I found that out last night at the ASus site not long after I posted this. now you have confirmed it for me. I have ordered an AT49F002T. This should work ok then? It's on the compatability list in the uniflash doc.
Rainbow
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It should work fine. My Asus P2B has Atmel AT49F002T installed from factory.
Patched and tested BIOSes are at http://wims.rainbow-software.org
UniFlash - Flash anything anywhere
biosAtom
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:?

Well i got my AT49F002T and I still get the same error. "unknown flash rom", "Is write protect disabled"

The only difference between my new flashrom and the one that came with it is mine is an AT49F002T-70PC while the one in the board is AT49F002T-12PC. The speed shouldn't matter that much should it? I have tried uniflash v1.29, aminf336.exe, aflash 1.3 and pflash. All of them give the same type of error. What am I doing wrong? there is nothing more to change in the bios settings. Is there on onboard jumper that needs setting? I know old motherboards did but I can't see any reference to it in the manual nor can I see one.
Rainbow
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It works on my P2B board... Does it work with the original chip? Did you insert the new chip correctly?
Patched and tested BIOSes are at http://wims.rainbow-software.org
UniFlash - Flash anything anywhere
biosAtom
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The original chip boots but I am afraid to try and flash it as a test incase there is an error and I am left with no working bios's. I am putting it in the correct way and making sure it is snug in there. the -70PC doesn't matter does it?

Maybe there is something in the bios settings I am missing? I have tried with "Security option" set to both setup and system and also tried turning Bios Virus protection to disabled.
biosAtom
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Have you been able to hot flash with your board? Does the curren't bios have something to do with it? What version of bios do you have for the P2B? Maybe the version of Award bios on my board is outdated or too new or isn't the version tested by uniflash with this chip? Just brainstormin....
biosAtom
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well, i got good news and i got bad news. The good news is that i was finnaly able to flash my chip. One thing to note is my chip did not have an "N" in the name where as the factory one did. I found out from the Atmel site that the N means the reset pin is disabled and that in order to be able to re-program the non "N" version you have to supply 12V to pin 1 (the reset pin). So, I used a peice of wire and jumpered pin 1 (A18) to pin 32 (Vcc) and it worked! it detected and it was flashed successfully! The bad news however is that only aflash1.37 was able to do it. Just for your benefit, i restarted the system, made sure the chip was detected by aflash and then exited the program without flashing. Then i used uniflash (-e) to try and flash it but if failed to detect. It was v1.29. So, aflash 1.37 worked on the jumpered AT49F002T-70PC but uniflash 1.29 did not.
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