The BIOS is a DIP package, so hot flashing on another motherboard (or potentially a network card) should work fine.

Yes? Even on another type of board?

Flashing with an ethernet card i never did. Might give that a try 🤣

Yes you can flash it on a different board, it doesn't matter. However if you use the official bios flasher for the other board it will probably not recognize the dump, so you need another flashing utility.

One that worked very nicely for all of my boards is called Uniflash. It basically does what it's name stands for : it's an universal rom flashing utility. This saved me quite a few motherboards and also allowed me to make boot roms for some of my network cards. (Netboot is awesome for quick testing, it makes you able to test quickly hardware and all you need is a network card. No more bulky floppy disks, no more CD drives that doesn't want to open anymore, no more "goddamn where did I put the CD ?!", etc ... ^^

Deksor wrote:

Yes you can flash it on a different board, it doesn't matter. However if you use the official bios flasher for the other board it will probably not recognize the dump, so you need another flashing utility.

One that worked very nicely for all of my boards is called Uniflash. It basically does what it's name stands for : it's an universal rom flashing utility. This saved me quite a few motherboards and also allowed me to make boot roms for some of my network cards. (Netboot is awesome for quick testing, it makes you able to test quickly hardware and all you need is a network card. No more bulky floppy disks, no more CD drives that doesn't want to open anymore, no more "goddamn where did I put the CD ?!", etc ... ^^

That last part sounds nice, can you please explain to me how that goes? How do i make such a network card?

For the BIOS you probably need an 'Atmel AT29C020(A)' 256KB or equivalent EEPROM.

Here are some photos of an undamaged board, but I cannot read the markings:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/252738122209

meljor wrote:

Yes? Even on another type of board?

Flashing with an ethernet card i never did. Might give that a try 🤣

MS-5169 uses 1Mbit flash chip which can be supported by many ethernet cards. I've flashed many 1Mbit chips with a 3COM 905C ethernet card and the flashrom utility. From a vague picture it seems to have the Winbond W29EE011 chip, which is quite popular, affordable and programmer-friendly. Near the flash chip there is a JP8 jumper which is not documented in the manual but I guess it's the selector for 5V or 12V flash chips, but better stay with 5V chips because many boards and cards can't flash 12V chips unless you wire 12V directly to the VPP.
The V2 and V2.1 versions of MS5169 have JP8 but the V3 and V4 don't. The board in the picture doesn't have the missing component on your board, and the green capacitor is located differently than your board, so I reckon this board has a different version number. Here are pictures of V3 and V4. I can't find 2.1, tho.

Some options for doing the flash, including Uniflash:
http://www.rainbow-software.org/uniflash/
and Flashrom:
https://www.flashrom.org/Flashrom
Flashrom DOS build:
http://buildbot.flashrom.org/buildresults/fla … 000577-MQE/dos/

What's the TO-220 part # in the second picture, top left?

meljor wrote:

That last part sounds nice, can you please explain to me how that goes? How do i make such a network card?

You need a PCI network card with a ROM socket. I have some 3c905b-tx that use exactly the same ROM chips as Motherboards. Once you have a network card that looks nice, look on the internet for a PXE boot rom designed for your card. 3com ones are easy to find. Once you flashed it you can enjoy booting from the network. (So you have to setup a boot server of course)

The only downsides are :
- you need hardware new enough to have roms made for PXE. Older ones allow you to boot from an RPL server, however I tried to make one with my little raspberry pi and I failed. It would be nice though, because this would actually allow me to boot from network with older hardware (even ISA cards are supporting this. I could boot my 486 from the network, this would be very cool !)
- For some reason, I never manged to boot from an ISO image which would be very useful to install quickly windows. I'm stuck with floppies ...(and once you booted on one of them you can't change it of course. Let's say you wanted to install windows 3.x with that, well since it asks more than one floppy, you can't install it. However you can put as many single bootable floppy as you want. I have an image from my 98SE boot floppy, memtest86, a floppy with killdisk on it and a network floppy) However one floppy is enough to start a net utility that allows you to browse a samba server for exemple (which is also within my raspberry pi)

My dream would be to install DOS, Windows, etc from the network on any of my computers with 16 bit ISA slots or better. Even though I'm pretty close to it hardware wise, like I said, finding how to make things work is quite hard since there is very little informations ...

The same method can be used for flashing BIOS EEPROMs. It's just a matter of using the right image when you flash, then you can pop the chip into the BIOS socket on the board you're fixing.

Thanks a lot guys! I'll look into it. I do have some 3com 905B cards laying around. Does i need to be exactly Winbond W29EE011 or are there others from Winbond that work as well?

Above pictures show that there is a revision that doesn't have the mosfet, would that mean i don't need it to boot the board? or is that a too big of a chance to take?
How can i determine the value of that mosfet?

meljor wrote:

Thanks a lot guys! I'll look into it. I do have some 3com 905B cards laying around. Does i need to be exactly Winbond W29EE011 or are there others from Winbond that work as well?

It's more important to check voltage, pin-compatibility and structure than brands when you are looking for alternative flash chips.
For example, SST 29EE010 seems a good candidate because it's also 5V, organized in 128 bit x 1024 pages without boot block and supported by flashrom. It's a good start to search from the flashrom-supported chips.

Ok, thanx. next time i will take boards that haven't been touched yet 🤣

Anybody who has some thoughts about the mosfet/transistor? I would love to know the value or know if i can use the board without it (because some revision's don't have it. I don't know its purpose)

I assume the bottom pin is connected on the other side?

If only two pins of this device are wired up, it's a just a diode.

Otherwise I'd need to know what it connects to. Got a multimeter handy? Have at it with a continuity tester.

Otherwise, with a heatsink like that, I'm guessing voltage regulator.

The two big pins you see on the photo held the heatsink in place, the connection was the 3 small holes to the right side of them on the picture. All 3 were connected as i can see right trough the solder at all 3 points.

So it is a big heatsink for such a small thing.

I have a multimeter.

That's the linear regulator that drops the 5V down to whatever the CPU needs, like e.g. 3V. It's most likely an LT1084: http://cds.linear.com/docs/en/datasheet/108345fh.pdf

It needs a big heatsink because it converts the voltage difference (VxI) into heat.

Measure the resistance from pin 1 (the one closest to the RAM slots) to GND. It should be a few kOhms. If you change the jumpers for the CPU voltage, the resistance should change accordingly.

When you buy the replacement part, make sure you get the adjustable version, not the fixed voltage version.

As for the BIOS, I would advise against hot flashing. It works, I have done it, but you do run the risk of frying something. Why do that when you can get a good programmer for less than $40?

http://www.ebay.com/itm/High-Speed-TL866CS-Pr … iQAAOSwFNZW1VCa

If you just fry one board, you probably wasted as much money as the programmer would cost ...

dosgamer wrote:

That's the linear regulator that drops the 5V down to whatever the CPU needs, like e.g. 3V. It's most likely an LT1084: http://c […]
Show full quote

That's the linear regulator that drops the 5V down to whatever the CPU needs, like e.g. 3V. It's most likely an LT1084: http://cds.linear.com/docs/en/datasheet/108345fh.pdf

It needs a big heatsink because it converts the voltage difference (VxI) into heat.

Measure the resistance from pin 1 (the one closest to the RAM slots) to GND. It should be a few kOhms. If you change the jumpers for the CPU voltage, the resistance should change accordingly.

When you buy the replacement part, make sure you get the adjustable version, not the fixed voltage version.

As for the BIOS, I would advise against hot flashing. It works, I have done it, but you do run the risk of frying something. Why do that when you can get a good programmer for less than $40?

http://www.ebay.com/itm/High-Speed-TL866CS-Pr … iQAAOSwFNZW1VCa

If you just fry one board, you probably wasted as much money as the programmer would cost ...

Thanx!

I will measure it, if the ohms DO change and it is a voltage regulator then PLEASE tell which part to buy exactly as i have no clue. In other words: what is the switching version of the LT1084 called? And can i place that one without any problems?

EDIT: i just measured it with my multimeter and the values indeed change on the left pin (to ground) when i change jumper settings for cpu voltage.

BTW any reason why some revisions (from pictures) seem to have the same layout but on them this particular regulator and heatsink is not placed?

If it is such an important regulator (for cpu) why do other versions work without it?

dosgamer wrote:

That's the linear regulator that drops the 5V down to whatever the CPU needs, like e.g. 3V. It's most likely an LT1084: http://c […]
Show full quote

That's the linear regulator that drops the 5V down to whatever the CPU needs, like e.g. 3V. It's most likely an LT1084: http://cds.linear.com/docs/en/datasheet/108345fh.pdf

It needs a big heatsink because it converts the voltage difference (VxI) into heat.

Measure the resistance from pin 1 (the one closest to the RAM slots) to GND. It should be a few kOhms. If you change the jumpers for the CPU voltage, the resistance should change accordingly.

When you buy the replacement part, make sure you get the adjustable version, not the fixed voltage version.

As for the BIOS, I would advise against hot flashing. It works, I have done it, but you do run the risk of frying something. Why do that when you can get a good programmer for less than $40?

http://www.ebay.com/itm/High-Speed-TL866CS-Pr … iQAAOSwFNZW1VCa

If you just fry one board, you probably wasted as much money as the programmer would cost ...

Or try the NIC method as you can power down when you swap.