[LinuxBIOS] Questions to flashing BIOS chips

Peter Stuge peter at stuge.se
Tue Aug 14 15:34:11 CEST 2007


On Tue, Aug 14, 2007 at 03:00:18PM +0200, Thomas Buschhardt wrote:
> I'm new to BIOS-flashing and have some questions and hopefully you
> can help me out. I got a Galep5 programmer with a DIL32 to PLCC32
> Adapter and samples of some flash-memory chips SST 49LF004B
> (33-4C-NHE).

Good stuff.


> These samples are from Gneral Software Inc. and Insyde Software. I
> backup the original BIOS to files and delete the chip after that I
> wrote my linuxbios.rom to the chip(s) and put it to the motherboard
> (AMD LX DB800), but nothing happen.

This could quite possibly be because the linuxbios.rom file just
doesn't work for the board. (Have you seen that file work on another
db800 board?)


> After that I wrote the original BIOS back to the chip (compare
> shown ok) and put these into the MB but nothing happen (again).

This is on the other hand rather strange.


> The MB is ok (I tested with other samples).
> Now my question: Its possible these samples have some "protection"
> against use with other BIOS (linuxbios :-) )

Not really.


> or how can I find the error?

Compare contents of the restored flash with one of the other samples.
If different, try putting the new contents into the restored flash
chip and see if it works. If not, you have a very strange situation
indeed, where one flash chip works and another does not, when they
both have the same contents. Are the flash chips the exact same
model? Compare all the letters and numbers on them.

Did you successfully boot the board using the restored chip before
flashing it with LB? If you didn't try this, the contents may just
not have been appropriate for the board.


//Peter




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