Great news!!! 😉

A little update: the Turbo button was set to either on or off, I don't remember, and that halted the ESCD Update. When I pressed it to the other setting, it worked fine. Not sure which setting was which but I just unplugged it from he header along with its LED an now all is back to normal.

Even though I've read this 100 times in the past week I'm not sure if ESCD updating every time I boot up is normal.
I'm not even sure it happened before all of this. Gonna read about it one more time. EDIT: yep, I've got W95 on the system. That's why I bet.

Thanks for all the suggestions and help.

Syntho wrote on 2023-01-29, 18:26:

A little update: the Turbo button was set to either on or off, I don't remember, and that halted the ESCD Update. When I pressed […]
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A little update: the Turbo button was set to either on or off, I don't remember, and that halted the ESCD Update. When I pressed it to the other setting, it worked fine. Not sure which setting was which but I just unplugged it from he header along with its LED an now all is back to normal.

Even though I've read this 100 times in the past week I'm not sure if ESCD updating every time I boot up is normal.
I'm not even sure it happened before all of this. Gonna read about it one more time. EDIT: yep, I've got W95 on the system. That's why I bet.

Thanks for all the suggestions and help.

Turbo on can even change wait state and CLK 2/3 for memory causing to be unstable. So ot's not only for the CPU clock, it was like that often in 286/386 PCs.

Spitz wrote on 2023-01-29, 10:04:

Syntho I may have solution for You. What cache chips are installed on mobo?

On one of my FIC-PA Mobo which I bought as non working I had corrupted cache modules. The option was to set 128, 256, 512 or off. Only 128 or off option work for it. It was freezing at ESCD same spot as in Your case. My opinion is that some of the info given from BIOS my go through cache if this one is enabled and if it's corrupted it will freeze.... Maybe that changed BIOS works in different way.. I dunno.

Anyway I've managed to fix this problem and mobo is usable. I highly recommend to work with switches/jumpers on mobo and try to chceck random options after uploading original BIOS.

Which PA motherboard was it exactly? You made me curious.

I just faced this ESCD issue on FIC PA-2005 I'm repairing right now after flashing incompatible BIOS image
I looked at: https://theretroweb.com/motherboards/s/fic-pa-2005#bios
and downloaded one from the 1st line vbs1-03d8 but I overlooked that it was not the latest one.
After I flashed it I got stucked at "Updating ESCD...", POST code 63h
I though my Flash SST29EE010 just weared out so I pull it out, put in the programmer, erased, burn some test pattern - verify OK, flashed BIOS image again and the same problem. I also flashed it to a different flash W29EE011 and still the same.
Then I looked again at BIOS downloads and found the latest one is 6201j900 (03/19/99) and flashed it to original SST29EE010 and it finally booted with "Updating ESCD... success" (only at once). Then it just check verify DMI pool data at next boots.

So I guess the problem was that BIOS image I flashed 1st time was not compatible with my FlashROM and once the code triggered writting to it (ESCD update) it just hanged because of couldn't handle the unknown chip...

But in the past I also met the case when one sector of FlashROM weared out by updating ESCD too much and it had to be replaced...