Success story (finally)

Hot-swapping and Boot-Block flash & Boot block flash and floppy support
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Valerio
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Posts: 13
Joined: Fri May 23, 2003 7:43 am

Today was a great day.

I have resurrected five nice motherboards I got for free (stamped as "irreversibly damaged" by the company I work in). There are some QDIs (Legend & Brilliant), an ASUS PB2-F, and a Intel-W6BXA. Most of them have still attached a PIII 500Mhz and some have even RAM....

I borrowed a eeprom programmer called S4 (www.dataman.com) and it happened to be REALLY EASY to use.
Specially taking into account it is my first time using this kind of devices and have very little knowledge of electronics.

The S4 that I have has only 128Kb RAM so apparently could not be able to flash 2Mbits chips.... WRONG! Flashing can be done in two (or more) steps so no need of expensive devices with more RAM.

I have experimented a lot and realized that in some cases, the chips not need to be the same. For example, the ASUS mobo has an original chip 29F00NT (discontinued) and it was fried. I flashed a the bios on a W29C020 (apparently easier to be found) and IT WORKED NICELY!.

Well I don't advice anyone to TRY HOT SWAPPING. Forget that method, the risk of lose a working mobo is VERY HIGH. Instead of it, try borrowing a epprom programmer o get someone to write the bios for you. It takes only 5-10 minutes!.


Valerio

P.S.: One of the mobo couldn't be rescued due a weird thing. Original bios chip was 1Mb but bios update availables were all 2Mb.....
Rainbow and Denniss have pointed that it could be a OEM reduced version or something.
KachiWachi
The New Guy
Posts: 1451
Joined: Fri Mar 29, 2002 10:32 pm
Location: Pennsylvania, USA

I had a post here in the past about this...

What file format do you select to program the chip?
Valerio
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Posts: 13
Joined: Fri May 23, 2003 7:43 am

File format I used is 'binary'.
In fact, if you read the content of the chip after burnt it must look exactly like you see when editing the bios file with a hex editor (i.e. UltraEdit).


Greets,
Valerio
KachiWachi
The New Guy
Posts: 1451
Joined: Fri Mar 29, 2002 10:32 pm
Location: Pennsylvania, USA

Thanks...

The reason I asked is because we tried this at work a bit ago, and we couldn't find a format that would complete the checksum routine. I had our "expert" helping me (perhaps that was the problem :roll:), but I've since grabbed the manual...so I'm sure I'll figure it out.
Valerio
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Posts: 13
Joined: Fri May 23, 2003 7:43 am

At least with the programmer I mentioned all worked fine when 'binary' format is selected. I didn't even find problems about checksumming when burning bios files in two steps (S4 128Kb but bios chips 256Kb).

I suppose it is the same for other devices.

Valerio
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