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PCChips A101 v1.4 patched BIOS flash problem

Posted: Thu Mar 23, 2017 10:33 am
by appiah4
I've tried flashing this BIOS onto my PCChips A101 v1.4 motherboard: https://www.wimsbios.com/biosupdates/la ... 0tech)/229

Current BIOS is:

Release 03/03/1997S (S for Small Block I presume)
03/03/97-i430VX-02071997C-00

BIOS chip is:

H.T.
M11704
J9709

I tried with AWDFLASH 8.99 using /PY switch and I got a "file size does not match" error.. I can't seem to find the size of my flash chip; the BIOS file is 128K but the mismatch error probably means my chip is 256K?

Not sure how to proceed. Could you please help?

Re: PCChips A101 v1.4 patched BIOS flash problem

Posted: Mon Mar 27, 2017 9:17 pm
by edwin
Can you give us the entire line that you type on the command prompt? Including filenames everything?

I have a gut feeling that the 8.99 flasher may even be too NEW for this file. Let me check if I can find on that.

H.T. is Hsin Tech, another alias for PC Chips.

Oh and the bios chip is made by Macronix and this is the worst of them all so it's very well possible the chip itself is already half-baked on its way to become toast. It should be 128K
http://www.alldatasheet.com/datasheet-p ... 1000P.html

You could try something like UniFlash
http://www.rainbow-software.org/uniflash/
to see what it reports under that marking, that is how we identiefied the other H.T. chips at the time:
bios-utilities-flash-programs-f36/anoth ... t4116.html

Re: PCChips A101 v1.4 patched BIOS flash problem

Posted: Sun Apr 02, 2017 7:24 pm
by appiah4
Hi,

Here's the UNIFLASH.EXE screenshot:

Image

Command used was awdflash /py bios.bin which complained about part number mismatch.

However, thanks to your suggestion I flashed with uniflash and it worked flawlessly! Board is now updated to the 10/15/97 modified BIOS, I can't wait to try a large HDD with it! THANKS A LOT!!

Re: PCChips A101 v1.4 patched BIOS flash problem

Posted: Tue Apr 11, 2017 8:41 pm
by edwin
You are most welcome, thank you for the feedback and we're looking forward to hear if it indeed takes the big disk.

Re: PCChips A101 v1.4 patched BIOS flash problem

Posted: Sun May 14, 2017 7:47 pm
by appiah4
Sorry for being so late, one often forgets to report success but frustration is always immediately vented..

The patched BIOS on this page works flawlessly, I have been using a 20GB Samsung Spinpoint ATA disk on this motherboard for a few months now; I can only congratulate and thank all involved.