BIOS Updates forum

I got a new idea how to get a 28F004 wired in parallel to the original 600E bios-EEPROM: hacksaw a ~50*100mm part containing bios-EEPROM and BX Southport out of a broken 600/600E/600X-motherboard, and wiring it parallel to the 600E motherboard. Now I regret that I destroyed my existing 600X motherb...

Sharedoc: don´t have too much experience with eeproms to help you out with this. Addressing might be an issue if you cascade two 29F020´s. The dock connector sounds good; but I don´t know if it´s still active upon starting the bios, maybe the extension port needs some activation. So southbridge seem...

Sebi, Thanks for the soldering tips. About /CE: I think you need a pull-up resistor for the disconnected input, since the wire to the switch acts as an antenna switching /CE active at 50Hz? Yes, you need a pull-up. The VCC-pins of the eeprom are on the same side as the /CE-pin, and there is a cap o...

Sharedoc, I always use the same technique to unsolder chips: push a thin wire (0.5mm should be fine) under the pins along one side of the chip, and tighten it somewhere (mostly I solder it somewhere). Now pull the wire on the other end in a 40-60° angle (but as near as possible on the PCB, ofcourse)...

easy sebi ! :? thanks for the link. what came up was 100's of different things none of them being the manual. Can´t believe it. Tried it again - the 2nd link says "Hardware Manitenance Manual index - ThinkPad general" and leads to a page with all available manuals. The 4th link reads "Hardware Main...

hi, could you post a link please? for the life of me i cannot find this guide thanks What? You can´t go to www.ibm.com, find the "search" field in the top right corner, and enter "maintenance manual 600e"? I hope you can click on the right link on this page: http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site.w...

Sebi, I suspct that the differences between PIII and PII caches are in hardware - not in setup. 600E bios does not initialize L2 because of it does not recognise CPUID. Later this causes an error situation in the bios (fires 127 error from bios exception or interrupt handler). I'll take a look at C...

Approach (4): What if we cheat that the PIII processor is PII, i.e. change after each CPUID instruction the content of returned value registers to contain PII CPUID. Think that would be a bad idea. As the pIII has a slightly different cache from pII it might require a slightlty different initialisa...

Sharedoc, the 2nd 28f004 comes from an almost dead 600e board, so it should be fine. Maybe the chip has been damaged upon desoldering or soldering to the board. I´ll try to get another chip and try again. What about your backup eeprom ? Did it work? Anybody else? Would be great to have a testing boa...

I started the disassembly at the reset vector. All parts I disassembled from there disassembled cleanly, all references contained valid code. Until now I found no unpacking routine nor packed code. The cache init routine is very similiar to the routine used by the linux kernel module, so I´m quite s...

I have also a spare 28F004 from a dead 600X motherboard. I could desolder it from 600X and solder it to 600E in parallel to the original flash. And make a wire jumper to /CE input to select which flash chip is active. But it is quite challenging work, and may ruin the motherboard if soldering goes ...

I believe (1) is difficult to do because 600X bios may have several places where the L2 is enabled, and it may be difficult to find them all. (2) has difficulty where to find a good exit point so that L2 becomes activated only once after the boot, and also after suspend-resume (Fn-F4). (2) has adva...

To be honest, I don't see real need of 600E bios modding for PIII any more. There is a working solution for 127 error and L2 initializatin in Windows and Linux.There is a working solution to SpeedStep. The only thing that has not been solved is that after suspend/resume (Fn-F4) you have to set L2 o...

Well, seems this thread has become a pure hardware-modding thread now. No one cares about bios update for correct pIII cache initialisation? Does anybody know a good bios modder who could help me with this issue? Don´t want to sacrifice another board. Recently stumbled over a modded bios for my A7N8...

Hi there, finally, I brought my 600e back to life by replacing the system board.... Did any of you found a solution in the meantime on how to enable the cache on resume from suspend or hibernation? As far as you´re using Linux and ACPI there´s no problem to unload and reload the cache enabling modul...