creating .bin file out of Toshiba bios download

[Vartech]

Greetings all...
I have a client Notebook Toshiba satellite a30 that now is a brick .
Flashing bios seemed to start O.K. but failed at about 60%
Now I have an adapter for my burner but the file on the floppy that the Toshiba program makes is too big for the flash rom .
They must be doing new things like compression these days(I am way out of touch these days and don't have a hope of getting up to speed on disassembler)
What can be done to make an image file out of that info in the .rom file.
I could see this problem described on the web yet .
There seems to be a lot of well-versed folks here, hope it's been done before .

Not expecting a freebie
Hugh Ireland
Hugh's Electronics and Computers

[Sharedoc]

"file on the floppy that the Toshiba program makes" ??

Could you be more specific?

[Vartech]

Hi ...
Pardon the ambiguious subject matter .
There is a self-extracting file from Toshiba that creates a bootable floppy
which contains a file named bl10180w.rom . This file is larger than the 512k rom space . There is also a file called almbdd15.bin I suspect is the compressor routine . Plus the usual boot files and 'phlash' program .
This note book failed on the 'PHLASH' program and is now dead .

Anyway , I do not posess the knowledge to make sense of this floppy .
in the olden days I could make my chips to take with me on service calls
or breath life into a pc that cannot boot the floppy from Award flash program for instance . These flash programs always had the binary image
that you would target by name for source . This file would always fit
EEROM .

Hope that helps anyone versed in PHLASH (can it's output be redirected in a PC to file maybe?)

Here's hoping
Hugh

[Vartech]

YABBA-DABBA-DO!
Toshiba is fixed . I was not having any luck here and elsewhere for this oddball question . So, I started the process to get a nice disassembler and get to work . Upon loading up files to mess with I noticed that at the break between H7FFFF and H80000 there was some text saying 'compal flashint.asm' a short way into H80000. I then began looking at differences between what was left of original EEROM and what toshiba creates on the floppy(BL10180W.rom) . Well they were just too close so I stripped off the rest of the file to make a 512k file and flashed original chip and Toshiba is no longer a brick(albeit a decorative one)!!

Feelin' pretty stupid
Hugh

[lamo]

you're lucky. but only in some cases. not all toshiba's notebooks have the complete binary file in update disk.

[edwin]

Hugh, can you send that rom file to edwin@wimsbios.com as it might come in handy one day.