BIOS Updates forum

I need a CMOS burner that will work on an Amptron P4 motherboard CMOS chip. I lost power during the update and so it cannot be updated without removing it.

Can someone suggest a vendor? It seems everyone I have tried has no clue what it even is and I thought I had some pretty good resources.

Use a Bios programming service or get a replacement chip

Local shop or www.badflash.com

badflash.com looks like a great site but I don't see a device the specifically indicates whether I can flash current CMOS chips with it?

Badflash only provides the programming service, be it with your chip or with a brand new one.

Yeah, I need to buy the device, not the burning service.

snoopy wrote:I need a CMOS burner that will work on an Amptron P4 motherboard CMOS chip. I lost power during the update and so it cannot be updated without removing it.

Are you saying you want an in-site programming device, i.e. to program the BIOS on the board, or are you saying you can remove the chip ? If you can remove the chip, there should be dozens of (v. expensive) devices available.
If you can tell us more about the mobo and/or chip we may have some other ideas, but buying a programmer to do one chip seems expensive.

I thought they were inexpensive little devices that worked via a serial port or something. The specific board number is P4-925LU. It is an Amptron Board

Sounds like he is looking for one of those C'T flasher boards...

Unfortunately C'T flasher doesn't support FWH chips (I'm quite sure a P4 board has one of them) I once planned to make a special adapter for FWH chips (I guess I still have the schematic somewhere lying around if somebody is interested) but the I discovered Willem Eprom Programmer which supports FWH via a special adapter. Bought the components already but haven't had time to make the PCB and assemble it. Another interesting DIY EPROM programmer that is capable of programming FWH (and, of course, also normal parallel flash chips) is BiDiPro. If I haven't bought the parts already for the Willem programmer, I think I would build this one (could get the PCB-s; not very cheaply but I guess they are much better than some homebrew ones).

sulbert wrote:I once planned to make a special adapter for FWH chips (I guess I still have the schematic somewhere lying around if somebody is interested)

I'm interested

Rainbow wrote:I'm interested

Looks like I don't have it anymore

But I'll try to describe it (any comments are welcome and feel free to ask any additional questions if something is unclear (probably because of my poor English?)):
The basic idea is described here (of course I would use the parallel programming mode of the FWH chips). Instead of 74LCX (difficult to get here) I planned to use 74LVC from Philips. For 3.3 V supply I thought one of those usual three-terminal voltage regulators would be OK (maybe it would be better to supply it from a Molex connector of the PC power supply instead of the +5V pin of the ISA slot).
I'll try to draw a new schematic but I have no idea when will I get it done since I'm quite busy right now.

I dumped the whole project because I had to write the whole software support for it by myself (Uniflash didn't support c't flasher then). Since I'm lousy C programmer I was not sure if I could do it (planned to use the linux software since it was the only which had sources available at this point of time).

The biggest problem is that the parallel mode has only 10 address lines which are used as row/column address (with the help of R/C# signal). So some more changes need to be done to the c't flasher.

I was considering to use address lines 0 ... 9 for address and address line 10 for R/C# signal...
But that's it, I have discontinued the project again after some further research. I think it would be more feasible to write software that supports FWH (or modify the original one) for CheapLPC. It's dead slow but I think it does the job. Any other opinons / additional comments?