I have 8 year old Gateway board made by Intel (Intel Advanced ATX also know as a "Thor board") that was flash upgraded by MrBios about 5 years ago. However I want to return the board to the original bios or at least the latest version of the original bios. At the time of the MrBios upgrade I did not use MrBios to save a copy of the original bios image because I had the original bios file and flash program from Gateway. Now I've discovered that MrBios has somehow flash protected the chip (28F001 12Volt) so that only the MrBios flash utility will work on it. I have tried re-downloading the Gateway bios and downloading a bios from Intel but both produce the same error message "system does not support Flash Memory Updating!". There are no flash chip jumpers to set on this board, so that’s not the problem. I have successfully flashed a different MrBios version onto the chip but can’t get the chip to flash using the utility provided by in the Gateway or Intel downloads. The Bios file from Intel and Gateway is a two part Bios and can’t be used by the MrBios utility.
There has to be a way, by using DEBUG, to read / write to the proper ports to disable the flash protection. Anyone know how? Or is there a utility that turns off the write-protection? Or is there a program that will accept two-part bios files and convert them into an image file that MrBios can use?
Write Protected Flash chip
You're right. There's a chipset register that you can write to so that the write protection on the Flash ROM can be toggled.
I found this documented in my chipset datasheet, and it should be documented in yours also.
I found this documented in my chipset datasheet, and it should be documented in yours also.
