[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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