can I use different brand of PLCC chip for BIOS in my board?

Hot-swapping and Boot-Block flash & Boot block flash and floppy support
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fanoush
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Posts: 5
Joined: Mon Jul 14, 2003 2:44 pm

Hello,

I flashed new (5.2) bios in my MSI K7N2 Delta-L motherboard. Now I cannot boot. I can get into the bios setup, it works OK (cpu,hdd,memory is detected) but it freezes when booting just before the older bios wrote the final info about interrupts assigned to various PCI devices and booted from disk. In new bios keyboard is dead (numlock, no ctrl+alt+del), empty screen, cursor blinking in left corner forever waiting for something.

I tried to clear cmos, disable onboard devices (LAN,sound), disable fdd controller, changed ddr timing and bus speed to more conservative, used different AGP card, but with no luck.

I'd like to go back to 5.1 or 5.0 bios, but I cannot boot from floppy. Boot block method cannnot be used as the new bios is flashed correctly. Fortunately I have xbox console with LPC modchip, which uses SST 49LF020 chip.

This chip is mentioned in uniflash documentation as 256KB chip and it looks physically the same like my bad bios chip but is probably of a diffrent brand (cannot read anything useful from the chip). My bios size is 256KB too. I believe I can flash the PC bios in my Xbox to the SST 49LF020 but then of course my xbox will not boot. Will it work in the PC motherboard? In that case I can boot it, reflash my original bios chip with older bios and then reflash the xbox chip back in PC with xbox bios so my xbox will work again.

The original bios cannot be flashed from xbox as it supports very few chips. I assume different brands has different programming methods/ block sizes/whatever, but maybe they are same for reading (i.e. as a ROM so they will boot in any motherboard). Is this correct?

Where can I buy spare SST 49LF020 or similar PLCC flash chip in Czech Republic? Is there some service like http://www.flashbios.org/ or someone willing to flash a bios for me in Czech (or Slovak) Republic?

Thanks for any help.

F
Rainbow
The UniFlasher
Posts: 3122
Joined: Wed Mar 20, 2002 4:16 pm
Location: Slovakia
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What chip do you have on the MSI board?
Patched and tested BIOSes are at http://wims.rainbow-software.org
UniFlash - Flash anything anywhere
fanoush
New visitors - please read the rules.
Posts: 5
Joined: Mon Jul 14, 2003 2:44 pm

Hello,

you mean the bios chip? On the bottom there is 'TAIWAN SA 223514101GF'. I'm not sure if anything is under the PhoenixBios sticker, but I cannot strip it. I want to return the board if nothing helps.

The board chipset in nForce2 ( http://www.msi.com.tw/program/products/ ... EL=MS-6570 ).

It is not critical that I can flash the SST 49LF020 back with xbox bios. At least I need to know if the SST 49LF020 with older bios flashed can be read by the PC motherboard and will boot.


Thanks.

F
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