BIOS Updates forum

I came across a mainboard which needed an upgrade with dimm and hdd.
I flashed with Uniflash which gave me the option to save the old BIOS.
I flashed the board with a wrong BIOS (from Luckystar). The board is now dead. When tried to hotflash with the saved BIOS I got an error which stated that I couldn't read from floppy. The BIOS was saved but couldn't be read due to either filecorruption or diskerror.
The information I got before the flashing was the following:
05/15/97-i430VX,UMC8669-2A59GH2BC-00. On the board 555 ver 1.41.
I think it's a Shuttle HOT-555 3 ISA 3 PCI. Searching for the original BIOS.
Thanks in advance

On this page and everything else there is to know about this board:

http://www.spacewalker.com/english/faq_e/555.htm#hd005

suriterrier wrote: When tried to hotflash with the saved BIOS I got an error which stated that I couldn't read from floppy. The BIOS was saved but couldn't be read due to either filecorruption or diskerror.

If you were hot flashing on another mobo, were you using the same floppy drive you did the save on ? There could be an alignment problem between the drives.

http://www.spacewalker.com/english/faq_e/555.htm#hd005

Flashed with their BIOS to no avail. The board is still dead.
Still have to try the fdd for the alignment problem.

Well so much for the alignment problem of the fdd.
I used the same drive, and still couldn't read from the floppy. I after that used EazyRecovery to recover at least the rombios file on the floppy in which I succeeded. Now here it comes. After I got the file I tried to flash the original romchip. It is a segmented one. (1x112K, 2x4k, 1x8K). It wrote part of the rombios-file to the chip. On the last part of the flash-proces I got 1 X in uniflash. After that the program tells me that the flashproces was a failure. I used the option to write also the bootblock. If I try and write only the rom-file to the chip it's a success, but it won't boot the machine. Now I'm wondering if it's possible to use another rom-chip which isn't segmented. Or if there are other procedures left which I haven't tried out yet.
Thanks.

What chip is that?

The chip is :
P2BF001
BXT150
U6218201
That # was printed underneath the Award BIOS sticker
Underneath the ROM-chip the following #:
7614135F
BJ HX 21Posted: Fri Jul 05, 2002 5:37 pm Post subject:

It's an Intel chip and recognized as such by Uniflash should be flashed on 12 V.

no more suggestions?

Intel chips can be real hard to flash properly. How about having it reprogrammed using a standard EEPROM burner (at an electronics shop)?

No hardware shops here that can do those kinds of tricks. Wishing there was another way out of this mess.

These Intel Chips need hardware support from the mainboard to flash the bootblock .
A highly risky operation to recover your dead board is to flash the Flashrom of your working board with the Bios of your dead board - use it in the dead board to bring it back into life and then flash the Intel Chip with the correct bios and reboot to test . After succesful test reflash the chip from your other working bios with the bios previosly installed to get this board working again .
It's only possible if both boards have 128KB Bios .

I thought I tried that already, but the problem seemed to be the boot block. When I flashed the chip Uniflash wasn't able to write the BIOS of the dead board successfully to the ROM of the dead board, nor to the ROM of the working board. In this case I've tried to flash the BIOS of the dead board on Winbond chips.

Actually after I tried that I noticed the "partitioning" of the Intel Flashrom (1x112K, 2x4K, 1x8K). What I wonder now, is that even that I used the wrong BIOS-file in which a bootblock was included, couldn't it be possible that the bootblock is still working, or does it need to be a bootvlock of the correct BIOS?

Hoping there will be light on the subject.

Which Uniflash are you using ?
Tried the correct Bios for HOT-555 Rev 1.4x ?
The Bootblock of the Intel ROM should be alive but with a Bootblock not designed for your Board so it won't work .
On the HOT-555 there is a Flash voltage jumper - this should be at 12V for Intel and 5V for Winbond .

I've used the Uniflash v1.25 and v1.27. Since I am not able to do the flashing proces on a similar board I do it on a jetway j648A mainboard which has a jumperto set the flashing voltage on either 5v or 12v flashing.