Bad BIOS Chip??

[KachiWachi]

Hi All -

I have an interesting situation here on a computer we sell to our customers for use as a Ground Support Computer.

It is a FieldWorks (Kontron) 8000 Series "Notebook"... BIOS ID = 10/25/20-i440BX-NSC309-2230213AC-00. UniFlash detects the chip as an ATMEL AT29C020(A), 256k. P-III 644MHz (99x6.5), 512MB RAM, Win98SE.

Every so often on a "reboot" I will see the AWARD BootBlock v1.0 screen come up (BIOS ROM checksum error), though all I have to do is power off the thing and it will go away as though everything was normal.

I also see the thing constantly updating the ESCD on every boot or reboot.

The only thing I noticed is that it uses an on-board ESS Solo-1 (ES1946) Sound Chip, and with each boot it runs a PnP utility to set itself up. Perhaps this is changing the setup somehow and is causing the ESCD updates...though I can't be sure.

I'd be more inclined to think think the BIOS chip is not very healthy...thoughts??

[Rainbow]

What OS is there? I've seen the constant ESCD updating somewhere. AFAIK, I've solved that by disabling NVRAM/ESCD updates somewhere in Windows Device Manager (maybe PnP BIOS or some other system device).
BootBlock might be because of either bad flash ROM, bad memory or even bad CPU or something other on board.

[KachiWachi]

I'll look for all that tomorrow, and test the board out with the "usual" suite of programs.

OS was Win98SE (see 1st post ).

[KachiWachi]

PnP BIOS (yes/no) is disabled in the BIOS.

It seems these are 2 seperate problems.

The ESCD happens when I boot to DOS mode as well, so it must be something we are doing in the config.sys and autoexec.bat files. It has nothing to do with the essolo.com that runs at startup (I think ). This is a minor, but annoying issue.

The BootBlock error occurs after we access a Decommutator board that we install. The board is a non-PnP ISA board that we setup to use IRQ10, I/O Address 0x300h (32 bytes), and 8Kbytes of Memory from D0000h. Once the board is accessed (in either Windows or from DOS), the BootBlock message appears on the next soft boot.

The BIOS is set for Legacy ISA to reserve the IRQ. The config.sys includes a line to exclude the memory region from use (device=emm386.exe noems novcpi x=d000-d1ff). Only the IRQ is reserved in Windows at present. The I/O and Memory space just happen to not be in use by Windows, so we are just lucky at present, though we probably should reserve those resources as well.

Any other thoughts??

[Rainbow]

So you get the bootblock when you use soft-reset but it works OK with hard-reset?
I've seen something like that on my notebook recently. I installed Linux there. When I rebooted from the Linux, the BIOS always hanged at "Fixed Disk 0: IBM-DKLA-2430" message. After some extensive testing, I found that it only happens when I load PCMCIA socket support (yenta_socket). So after some hacking with PCMCIA controller PCI registers, found that when I set memory_limit registers to 0 when reboot, it does work fine. So there's a bug in the BIOS which is causing the hang if the memory regions of the cardbus bridge(s) are configured somehow.

[KachiWachi]

Hmmm...

These are newer computers with PCMCIA. I never saw this problem with the older models, which didn't have that feature. I don't think it can easily be disabled...

Windows says IRQ11, D6000000->D6000FFF for one.
Windows says IRQ 5, D6001000->D6001FFF for the other.

Data from Craig Hart's PCI.EXE (v.48ß) -

Bus 2 (PCI), Device Number 8, Device Function 0
Vendor 104Ch Texas Instruments (TI)
Device AC1Bh PCI1450 PC card CardBus Controller
Command 0007h (I/O Access, Memory Access, BusMaster)
Status 0210h (Has Capabilities List, Medium Timing)
Revision 03h, Header Type 82h, Bus Latency 20h
Self test 00h (Self test not supported)
Cache line size 32 Bytes (8 DWords)
PCI Class Bridge, type PCI to Cardbus
System IRQ 5, INT# A
PCI bus number 2, CardBus bus number 3, Subordinate bus number 3
CardBus latency 00h
New Capabilities List Present:
Power Management Capability
Current Power State : D0 (Device operational, no power saving)

Hex-Dump of device configuration space follows:
0000 4C 10 1B AC 07 00 10 02 03 00 07 06 08 20 82 00 L..¬......... ‚.
0010 00 00 00 D6 A0 00 00 02 02 03 03 00 00 10 00 D6 ...Ö ..........Ö
0020 00 20 00 D6 00 30 00 D6 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 . .Ö.0.Ö........
0030 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 05 01 C0 03 ..............À.
0040 12 34 56 78 01 A0 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 .4Vx. ..........
0050 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 ................
0060 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 ................
0070 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 ................
0080 60 90 44 08 00 00 00 00 88 81 81 01 75 A9 CB FE `