BIOS Updates forum

Greetings all...
I have a client Notebook Toshiba satellite a30 that now is a brick .
Flashing bios seemed to start O.K. but failed at about 60%
Now I have an adapter for my burner but the file on the floppy that the Toshiba program makes is too big for the flash rom .
They must be doing new things like compression these days(I am way out of touch these days and don't have a hope of getting up to speed on disassembler)
What can be done to make an image file out of that info in the .rom file.
I could see this problem described on the web yet .
There seems to be a lot of well-versed folks here, hope it's been done before .

Not expecting a freebie
Hugh Ireland
Hugh's Electronics and Computers

"file on the floppy that the Toshiba program makes" ??

Could you be more specific?

Hi ...
Pardon the ambiguious subject matter .
There is a self-extracting file from Toshiba that creates a bootable floppy
which contains a file named bl10180w.rom . This file is larger than the 512k rom space . There is also a file called almbdd15.bin I suspect is the compressor routine . Plus the usual boot files and 'phlash' program .
This note book failed on the 'PHLASH' program and is now dead .

Anyway , I do not posess the knowledge to make sense of this floppy .
in the olden days I could make my chips to take with me on service calls
or breath life into a pc that cannot boot the floppy from Award flash program for instance . These flash programs always had the binary image
that you would target by name for source . This file would always fit
EEROM .

Hope that helps anyone versed in PHLASH (can it's output be redirected in a PC to file maybe?)

Here's hoping
Hugh

YABBA-DABBA-DO!
Toshiba is fixed . I was not having any luck here and elsewhere for this oddball question . So, I started the process to get a nice disassembler and get to work . Upon loading up files to mess with I noticed that at the break between H7FFFF and H80000 there was some text saying 'compal flashint.asm' a short way into H80000. I then began looking at differences between what was left of original EEROM and what toshiba creates on the floppy(BL10180W.rom) . Well they were just too close so I stripped off the rest of the file to make a 512k file and flashed original chip and Toshiba is no longer a brick(albeit a decorative one)!!

Feelin' pretty stupid
Hugh

you're lucky. but only in some cases. not all toshiba's notebooks have the complete binary file in update disk.

Hugh, can you send that rom file to edwin@wimsbios.com as it might come in handy one day.