[LinuxBIOS] Questions to flashing BIOS chips

Peter Stuge peter at stuge.se
Wed Aug 15 22:32:55 CEST 2007


Hey,

On Wed, Aug 15, 2007 at 01:54:59PM +0200, Thomas Buschhardt wrote:
> > It is quite likely that the different sample BIOS images from the
> > vendors are different, even if for the same hardware.
> 
> Of course they differ, but if I read 1 chip 3 times and compare the
> bin's - they differ too :-(

Ouch. Do they differ a lot? Can you run xxd on them and then diff?

Bit errors indeed start showing when the chip has been through
(quite) a few erase/rewrite cycles. I had not heard about that
write protection idea before.


> > Can you get a few other flash chips for further testing?
> 
> Today I telephone with the Galep producer and he said - some chip
> vendors use a "writeprotection technic" that u cant use the free
> samples to burn your own image on it. I order some new (clean ;-))
> chips. I understand these method, because one of these vendor
> (www.insydesw.com) offer 50 chips for free - its quite a lot of
> money (1 chip is about 5.90 EUR).

If you are a company and have a budget for more than just a few chips
you can usually get a decent deal for 30 chips (one tube) from the
local component distributors.

Price goes down a lot when quantity goes up, so I doubt Insyde is
paying very much.. :)


//Peter




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