DFI CW35-L, Wrong Bios

Hot-swapping and Boot-Block flash & Boot block flash and floppy support
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th
Legacy means reliability
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Joined: Thu Mar 21, 2002 5:41 pm
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Ok here is the situation:
I got hold of a DFI CW35-L, i810 chipset, soldered FWH (Grrr).
Someone (not me, I swear) flashed a Bios from a MSI, i810 based board in it.
Both Bios versions are Award 6.00.
The Board starts, but hangs right after CPU detection.
Booting not possible.

Does someone know, how to force boot block on an Award 6.00 Bios?

Bye
Thomas
286-16/NEAT Chipset/4 MB Mem/40 MB HDD/512kB Tridet/WfW
Rainbow
The UniFlasher
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FWH? That's bad - there are no address pins to short :(
Patched and tested BIOSes are at http://wims.rainbow-software.org
UniFlash - Flash anything anywhere
NickS
BIOS Bodhisattva
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I suppose it must be possible to build an address decoder that you could set to force the data bus to all low on an address or range of addresses in the EEPROM, causing a checksum error? (not necessarily on the flash chip itself)
Last edited by NickS on Thu Sep 19, 2002 9:30 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Tested patched BIOSes. Untested patched BIOSes.
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Rainbow
The UniFlasher
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Or cause FWH chip reset at the right time - when the boot block reads compressed BIOS from FWH. This would require the slowest CPU and a lot of luck.
Patched and tested BIOSes are at http://wims.rainbow-software.org
UniFlash - Flash anything anywhere
NickS
BIOS Bodhisattva
Posts: 3145
Joined: Fri May 03, 2002 10:34 am
Location: Thames Valley, UK

I think I'd better explain that I don't know why the FWH doesn't have an address bus to short, and go away to read the data sheet.....
.....ah, right. Sort of serial/parallel EEPROM stylee...or not, as the A/A mux mode doesn't look too far from ordinary EPROM mode, 11 address and 8 data lines.
Tested patched BIOSes. Untested patched BIOSes.
Emails *will* be ignored unless the subject line starts "Wim's BIOS forum"
Rainbow
The UniFlasher
Posts: 3122
Joined: Wed Mar 20, 2002 4:16 pm
Location: Slovakia
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The chip is in FWH mode when placed on mothebroard. The pseudo-parallel mode is only for external programming (selected by one of the pins).
Patched and tested BIOSes are at http://wims.rainbow-software.org
UniFlash - Flash anything anywhere
th
Legacy means reliability
Posts: 113
Joined: Thu Mar 21, 2002 5:41 pm
Contact:

I forgot to say, I even tried known flaky ram, didn't work out.

Looks like we have de-soldering job here then, sigh.

Thanks for all the input.

Bye
Thomas
286-16/NEAT Chipset/4 MB Mem/40 MB HDD/512kB Tridet/WfW
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