Precautions to take when hot swapping ? Dead motherboard.
Posted: Tue Jul 02, 2002 7:58 pm
I've been given an ECS (eilte group) P6LX-A+ motherboard with a celeron 450 to use for a spare computer in the house. the previous owner declared it dead have tried to upload the wrong BIOS file and suffered a blackout halfway through, what luck.
a few questions for those that know better:
if i try and boot it using either AGP or ISA video cards my monitor registers NOTHING. connecting a floppy to the motherboard or to an ISA floppy controller gives nothing there either, so i can safely assume the boot block section of the BIOS (if it had it) is dead too, right ?
so i go onto the next stage *sigh*
the BIOS is an award distribution on a winbond w29c011 flash rom chip which it would seem has been tested to work with uniflash.
now i do have another motherboard of similar vintage, a gigabyte, it's also got an award based BIOS (the chip doesn't look like a winbond though), without replacing the chip on the ecs motherboard i understand i can hot swap the BIOS chips on the working computer (assuming the BIOS is shadowed), use uniflash and if the chip isn't in some way damaged, flash it all back together.
trouble is, what if i damage the BIOS on the computer MY MOTHER USES. i might be adult but mum is capable of inducing sufficient wrath to put me off the idea.........
what precautions can i take, and is there a better way of doing this ?
incidentally, there's a computer shop here that has some "defective" motherboards, if i pinch their 32-pin BIOS chips and hope that one gets the boot process far enough to let uniflash get the BIOS onto it, will it matter if the chips aren't identical (eg if the replacement is at least 128kb in size ?)
Ta all
a few questions for those that know better:
if i try and boot it using either AGP or ISA video cards my monitor registers NOTHING. connecting a floppy to the motherboard or to an ISA floppy controller gives nothing there either, so i can safely assume the boot block section of the BIOS (if it had it) is dead too, right ?
so i go onto the next stage *sigh*
the BIOS is an award distribution on a winbond w29c011 flash rom chip which it would seem has been tested to work with uniflash.
now i do have another motherboard of similar vintage, a gigabyte, it's also got an award based BIOS (the chip doesn't look like a winbond though), without replacing the chip on the ecs motherboard i understand i can hot swap the BIOS chips on the working computer (assuming the BIOS is shadowed), use uniflash and if the chip isn't in some way damaged, flash it all back together.
trouble is, what if i damage the BIOS on the computer MY MOTHER USES. i might be adult but mum is capable of inducing sufficient wrath to put me off the idea.........
what precautions can i take, and is there a better way of doing this ?
incidentally, there's a computer shop here that has some "defective" motherboards, if i pinch their 32-pin BIOS chips and hope that one gets the boot process far enough to let uniflash get the BIOS onto it, will it matter if the chips aren't identical (eg if the replacement is at least 128kb in size ?)
Ta all