Cannot do Hotflash with almost ANY flash chip !!!

Hot-swapping and Boot-Block flash & Boot block flash and floppy support
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seek&destroy
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Joined: Sun Mar 12, 2006 3:38 am

Hello all people!!
I'm new here, and English isn't my favourite language 8), but i'll try to make an effort and write in an intelligible way :) :)

Well, I have a bunch of PCChip boards, some are M810, some M748, a pair of M925, all apparently fine. When cheking them out, i've found that various mobos don't work, others are OK, and others have BIOS related problems. So, interchanging BIOS between them (and some bad mobos already in home XD ), i've managed to rescue all but 3 mobos: the three are the same, PCChips M810LM rev 7.1C (these have a Duron onboard, soldered and overclocked, with SiS 730 chipset).

I asked a friend (wich has the same, working board) to extract an image of his BIOS to a file, so at least I try to hotflash with the help of the other boards. (By the way, an EEPROM programmer isn't an option in my case :x :x )

So, to make the story short, I've recollected all bios chips that I KNOW FOR SURE that are good, and tried to hotflash the right BIOS for the M810 on them with various of the other mobos, and even in my 2 PCs (with mobos Asus P2Z and Jetway no-name :lol: , the two are Pentium III, old but trusty :) ) only to discover that every program (AWDFLASH, UniFlash and others) says the same thing: "FLASH VERIFICATION ERROR" (or something like that). No matter which combination of chips and mobos I tried, it keeps giving errors and even freezing at mid-flashing. And I even checked the voltage specs of every chip, to make an adequate flash process and don't damage them. :? :? At least if I can flash only the bootblock...

The chips i've tried to flash are all 256 kbytes, 32-pin DIL type, from various vendors such as ASD, SyncMOS, Atmel, EON, Macronix, and others. I really need help, as I cannot understand what the hell are going here.

One thing that bothers me is that some boards use Award bioses, while others use AMI ones. Can it be the cause of my headaches? Is there a flashing program that REALLY likes to flash ANYTHING to the chip without failing or complaining all the time (don't worry, i'm new here but definitely NOT a newbie on this so I will never flash any file to the chips... i think :P ) Does anyone know how to make a homemade flasher card (maybe an ISA one) ??? Are the world really round ???

Regards,
Seek&Destroy 8) 8)
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