It looks like I bricked my Kayak XU800 board. BIOS crisis recovery doesn't work either. There is no floppy activity. The BIOS chip is not socketed unfortunately, and I don't want to place an empty socket on the board with the risk of ruining the whole thing. So I figured I could hook up an empty socket in mirror-image. Test drive using a spare EEPROM:

Only a few pins left who are making bad or no contact... I slightly bent the contact points in the socket using a modified staple.

Sometimes you need to cut the bottom out for sockets to seat deep enough to make contact when on top of a chip.

BitWrangler wrote on 56 minutes ago:

Sometimes you need to cut the bottom out for sockets to seat deep enough to make contact when on top of a chip.

I see what you mean, but here's our brick:

Not many tall components, just a few low profile SMD caps or resistors but these are not obstructing.

I had mixed luck flashing chips while still in system, stuff like whole mobo trying to power off injected voltage etc, sometimes powering on and keeping it in reset helps