VOGONS


First post, by drosse1meyer

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Hello all

Just some background on what I've been trying to do before jumping into questions:

A while back I bought a used socket370 board from fleabay. It powers on but unfortunately hangs during POST, no beep codes. I've tried different RAM, CPU, video, clearing CMOS, etc. Playing with jumpers (e.g. change auto to correct FSB, etc.) Same results. Caps look good, board is clean (although obviously this isnt 100% foolproof), so I wanted to try everything I can before either buying another board or attempting a re-cap.

Diagnostic card stops at 'd5'. The board does not respond to the 'ctrl+home' while powering on to recover flash.

I was thinking that perhaps the BIOS is corrupt in some way, perhaps a bad flash attempt, so I was looking into hot flashing the latest available binary. This is an AMI bios, socketed PLCC style. I do have another board which I can use as a 'donor', its an old 939 with PLCC socket (phoenix bios).

I've been able to get the donor booted with a DOS floppy and swap out the chips, however I keep getting messages such as with afudos "46 unable to get flash information"... I've also tried other tools such as the MSI supplied "amifXXX.exe" which doesn't appear to work either.

Are there any suggestions as to what else I can try? Am I correct in that even though the donor board is different in many respects, it should in principle be able to reprogram a different chip this way?

I've also seen some suggestions to try UNIFLASH or a linux live boot cd which has more utilities for manipiulating roms and flashing.

Thanks for reading!

Last edited by drosse1meyer on 2021-08-10, 18:06. Edited 1 time in total.

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Reply 1 of 1, by BitWrangler

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I think it's unable to autodetect the flash chip type. If you use a flash util that allows you to specify it, you may get past that. Motherboard you are trying to flash the chip in may have been inflexibly wired, so as to only support a limited number of chips, like only 1Mb when you need to flash a 2Mb or 4Mb.

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