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Erase Chip Failed!

Posted: Tue Mar 04, 2003 5:55 am
by hillbilly1980
I'm attempting to upgrade some old pcchip m520 compatible ( true manfuacture is unknown, and i have 2 of these with slightly different, but almost identical boards) so they will read an 8 gig drive. Currently i swap the drive out of the old system and place it in either new one i get a "disk i/o error" I'm assuming this has to do with my bios being out of date and not supporting the new site. The system i'm removing it from had a power surge and keeps give check sum errors after the power has been turned off.

After much trouble tracking down the offending boards, and finally locating bios's for them, like the amptron pm79000, whenever i attempt to use awdflash to i get an "erase chip failed" error. I tried uniflash 1.29 and am told ( for both boards ).
-------------------------------
Flash rom chip : unkonwn
Organization : n/a ( is write proctect disabled?)
---------------------------------------
The bios chips themselves are listed here:

board 1: h.t. m10189 t9634
When booting this board has an S after the release date, i have learned this should mean its a 5v chip

board 2: mx28f10000pl
When this board boots it has an L after the release date, this should be a 12v


Any help... would help
Thank

Posted: Tue Mar 04, 2003 4:24 pm
by KachiWachi
Lots of stuff on the M520/Amptron PM7900/etal. can be found here at The PCChips Lottery. Look in the M5xx-586 boards and search for M520. A patched BIOS is available to break the 8GB HD limitation.

Posted: Tue Mar 04, 2003 6:38 pm
by Denniss
Both chips are 12V Flashroms but of different type :
The "S" or "L" require different Bios as "S" is for small Block Flashroms and "L" for Large Block Flashroms

Correct Pcchips Lottery adress :
http://www.stud.fernuni-hagen.de/q3998142/pcchips/

Posted: Tue Mar 04, 2003 8:32 pm
by Rainbow
Make sure that you have set the voltage jumper to 12V on both boards.
I have two these boards too - both have H.T. chips. One of the chips is OK, the other one is damaged - cannot be neither identified, not flashed, even at 12V.

Wow that was written late

Posted: Wed Mar 05, 2003 1:58 am
by hillbilly1980
Sorry i just read that post over again, its kinda confusing... it was late.

I understand the s and l, and i've been using the *s.bin file for the board that has Release dates and vis versa for the L board.
And logically, its having a problem eraseing the old bios, so whether its l or s bin doesn't matter yet, it would be a problem if it worked and i had to reboot, but not at the point its failing.

Now if i understand you want me to change the voltage from the 5 v to the 12v, i would have assumed that would damage the bios chip, is this not the case? I'll check what its set to, i never looked, i would assume if the L was present it would be reflective on the jumper setting, maybe i'm missing the point of the 12/5v jumper.

Thanks for the repies, if someone could point me to some clarity on the 5v vs 12 v, or has any further insight i would appreciate it.

HT Worked

Posted: Wed Mar 05, 2003 3:55 am
by hillbilly1980
Swapping the jumper to for the H.T. chip worked, i successfully upgraded to te amptron 7900 bios. Thanks for the help, now on the other machine.

This is absolutely confirmed for this machine. With a MXIC 28F1000P bios chip, as award finally recognized it.
The 12 v jumper was in place since i got this board, this is confirmed. I actually thought that L/S corrosponded to the voltage type of the chip because one had a jumper and an L and the other had no jumper and an S
aka L=12v S=5v

Anyway, I removed the jumper thinking prehaps this board was the opposite, closed for 5 open for 12, that didnt' work same issue, got part way to erasing the chip and failed. I replaced it and tried a 3rd time ( for today ) and god damit it worked, recognized the chip and bunched the upgrade through.

The only thing i can think of that would have caused this, outside an obviously crappy motherboard setup, is that the maybe the jumper was some how not making contact, like it was corrided or extremely oxidized, but the enviroment and condition of the system does not suggest this to be a real possiblity, but to be objective i'm throwing it out there.


Anyway their both updated. Thanks guys

Posted: Wed Mar 05, 2003 8:57 pm
by KachiWachi
I was referring to the message board, since most of the troubleshooting shows up there and not at the main site source :-) Glad you had success!!