Video BIOS Flashing questions

Discusses BIOS flashers and utilities from Award, AMI and Uniflash
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inconel
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Posts: 15
Joined: Fri Jul 09, 2004 7:16 am

Hello everyone,

I'm having trouble flashing the video bios of my Mobility 9600 Pro on a notebook with an Intel 865PE motherboard and PhoenixBIOS v4.0 revision 6. The only utility that can produce a copy of my video bios so far is dumpbios.exe. I haven't tried UniFlash yet. Can the -save and -PCIROM commands be used together so I can test its compatibility with my system?
Another thing that may be causing me difficulty is the fact that my video bios is shadowed and there seems to be no way to change this in my bios setup.
Thank you in advance for any advice.
Rainbow
The UniFlasher
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Joined: Wed Mar 20, 2002 4:16 pm
Location: Slovakia
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BIOS must be always shadowed on all PCI and AGP cards because PCI specification requires that the code is copied to system RAM and NOT executed from the card's ROM directly.
And more, notebook computers have the VGA ROM compressed inside the system BIOS so it must be decompressed to RAM. And that's also why you can't flash it.
Patched and tested BIOSes are at http://wims.rainbow-software.org
UniFlash - Flash anything anywhere
inconel
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Posts: 15
Joined: Fri Jul 09, 2004 7:16 am

Thank you for your response Rainbow. Everything I've been reading lately is saying that shadowing video bios is no longer benefical in today's graphics cards and most people disable it in the bios. It has also been said that it can cause problems when flashing. But I still don't know why dumpbios is the only utility that can produce the full 64kb video bios of my system. As far as I know, even mobility cards have their own flashrom. I would at least like to try to see if disabling shadowing can help. Is there a specific line in the system bios that needs to be changed to disable video bios shadowing or is there an editor available for Phoenix bios? I've heard good things about UniFlash. I'd like to see if it can also save my video bios like dumpbios can. Can -save be used with -pcirom command? If that is possible, can you give me an example of what the command would look like.

Thanks again for your help. :wink:
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