Horun wrote on 2021-01-25, 05:00:
[...]
You can try that but are you willing to risk ruining the Tomcat ? Hotflashing is tricky and can ruin a good board... just my opinion.
That's a bit FUDdy... I fully agree with darry (and others) that a programmer is a far, far better solution, and could kick myself I waited so long to buy one. But... if you don't have a programmer and need to recover BIOS *NOW*, hotflashing is a perfectly valid alternative.
I've done it literally hundreds of times and only once killed a board. How? By putting the EEPROM in the wrong way round. Stupid, but could have happened just as easily with a proper programmer as you're still pulling and plugging the things. Whether you do it with power on or off doesn't make much difference here, with the EEPROM the wrong way round, magic smoke is going to be released. As a matter of fact I messed up replacing the EEPROM after flashing, so the board wasn't even on at the time.
That said, in this case I'm not too optimistic:
- apparently Uniflash doesn't work with the IWill board+EEPROM combo.
- Tyan boards can be a bit unusual when it comes to flashing. I've tried and failed to use UniFlash on quite a few. Not ones this old, so maybe that Tomcat might work, but I wouldn't count on it.
Question is if this is still that obscure Intel EEPROM that didn't look right in the board in the first place. If so, I'd say that - and not the IWill board itself - is the limiting factor. Getting another more normal EEPROM could go a long way to getting this working.