First post, by amigasith
- Rank
- Newbie
As I wrote in this thread here, I'm a proud owner of a Biostar MB-8433UUD-A mainboard since a couple of weeks. I am now experimenting with different BIOSes and came across something that I cannot explain. Perhaps one of the gurus on this board can help me out.
I flashed feipoa's latest 2014 BIOS onto a 39SF010A flash chip from Microchip. It's brand new and not a new old stock one. Here is a picture:
UNIFLASH recognizes the flash chip type correctly and both flashing and verifying work just fine. All the rectangles on the progress bar are green. And the funny things is that board also POSTs correctly with the newly flashed chip, but only up to a certain point. It always hangs at
Updating ESCD ...
and that's it. It doesn't even react to Ctrl-Alt-Del anymore and I have to hard-reset. It's like the ESCD area on the chip contains garbage and the BIOS wants to update ESCD at every boot. But then it can't write to the ESCD area for some reason (?). That's my theory at the moment.
feipoa mentions in his great 8433 manual revision 2.0 that depending on the flash type, the "...memory address where the Plug and Play ESCD data is stored" can be different between different flash chip types. But this one here is definitely a 5V one according to its datasheet and as I said, flash and verify works just fine.
I tried some old versions of AWDFLASH that I found that still support the /f switch to force updating the BIOS with whatever file you provide to it. And I also added the /cp switch in order to clear PnP / ESCD, but for some reason, all old AWDFLASH versions that I tried just hang and don't even start writing to the flash chip, although they are recognizing the type of flash chip correctly (39SF010A).
--> Does anybody have an idea of what could be going wrong here?
Perhaps a tip regarding a specific version of AWDFLASH? Perhaps using MODBIN to change the memory address of the ESCD area, if that's possible at all?