Dead Averatec 3150H Bios

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Akronix
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Joined: Wed Dec 08, 2004 5:45 pm

This is from an Averatec 3150H 12" notebook. The bios chip is a socketed PLCC SST39SF040, ami bios.

I believe I might have flashed the wrong bios from Averatec's 3120 model a few months ago. I don't know for sure because the NB won't boot now. It does go through what I believe to be the boot block procedure, but with only cdrom access (no floppy) and no video. I've tried several times to restore via boot block, but nothing I put on CD or any AMI procedure I tried would work. I might have corrupted the boot block with the bad flash.

I've tried hotflashing with uniflash on an older Packard Bell motherboard that had a PLCC socket. All I got was verification errors, which might be due to how old that PB motherboard is. The bios was 128k and the Averatec's is 512k, just too incompatable.

I'm currently trying with an Intel Pro/100 PCI card and it seems to work with uniflash, but I am still having some problems and am seeing some strange occurences. The info I got from the Intel nic came from this site... http://sandeen.net/fwfix/

First of all, Intel has some utilities that read and write the boot ROM on their nics, and using fboot from Intel only allows me to make a backup of the current image on my chip, write fails. Strange thing is the backup is 1024k in size while my bios chip is supposed to be 512k.

Uniflash doesn't detect the chip, so I have to use -force and the chip ID BFB7, but I am still getting verification errors.

Any thoughts? I'm kind of stumped here...
Ritchie
BIOS Guru
Posts: 761
Joined: Wed Oct 30, 2002 5:17 am

I am not sure that CD-ROM booting will help with bootblock.

The laptop does definitely not boot the floppy? I would try creating the appropriate floppy boot disk and popping it in the machine, powering up and giving several minutes watching to see if the light comes on on the floppy and if the system appears to be reading the floppy at all. If the floppy does read but the BIOS does not reflash correctly you may only have to make corrections to the bootdisk.
Akronix
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Joined: Wed Dec 08, 2004 5:45 pm

No floppy drive on this machine.
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