[LinuxBIOS] Gigabyte's DualBios and recovery from a botched Linuxbios flash?

sales at bradbrown.com sales at bradbrown.com
Tue Dec 27 23:49:00 CET 2005


  I was preparing to flash an ECS NForce4-A939 motherboard with Linuxbios
using advice I received earlier this week on this mailing list.  Since the
bios chip is a surface mount package, I have no easy way of restoring the
original manufacturer bios image should I flash an invalid rom image to the
motherboard.

  To minimize my risk, I planned to flash a Gigabyte motherboard with a
similar chipset configuration, just to prove my image would theoreticaly
work on the ECS board.  This motherboard has something called Dualbios,
which essentially allows you to boot from a secondary bios image should
something go wrong.  However, I noticed that to activate this feature and
access the backup BIOS image, you had to enter the CMOS setup for the
motherboard, whereas I initally assumed the backup mechanism was jumper
activated.

  So my questions are:

  1. Does anyone know if the Gigabyte Dualbios feature will still work once
I flash the primary bios image with Linuxbios.  If so, it would allow me to
recover if my first image is bad.  I don't see how it would work, since I
assume Linuxbios will overwrite any recovery logic, rendering the backup
bios image inaccessible.  

  2. Other than using a fallback image in my Linuxbios image, or using this
Dualbios feature, are there any other economical ways to recover from a bad
Linuxbios flash, when dealing with a non-socketed bios chip?

  I just have this sinking feeling that I'll flash my MB, and end up with a
$75 brick, hence these questions...

Thanks,
Brad Brown

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