[MLB-WIRELESS] How to repair a Bios or two

[Paul van den Bergen]

Hi all,

Those who know me will know that occasionally I go through clumsy
phases...  during one of these phases about a year or so ago I managed
to kill the BIOS chips on two motherboards - lets call them A and B[1].
  since then I have been deperately trying to fix them - that means I
have done nothing about it until last week when I got the courage up to
attemtp a bios boot block/floppy drive repair...

the consequences of that was to almost let the magic smoke escape on
system A's bios chip[2].  System B didn't seem to do anything.

It is posible that the flash sequence I have edited into the
autoexec.bat (dos 6.22 boot disk) does not work but since I cannot find
a manual for the flash  programs anywhere, and am kinda reluctant to try
it on a working system, just in case it DOES work...

there is an article on sysopt.com that started this all off.
http://www.sysopt.com/articles/recoverbios/index.html

Question number 1)
Anyhoo, I have found a place in SA that does BIOS chips called OZFlash,
www.ozflash.com.au, who will do a bios chip for $32 pph $7.  does anyone
know a place in melbourne who does this so I can either take the MB in
or avoid the postage cost?  this is especially relevant for System A
which I believe has an unrecoverable bios chip.

Question number 2)
DOes anyone have a flash burner that is capable of burning a BIOS chip?
  The bios downloads for both chips are readily available, and if the
chips I have cannot be burned I can likely get new bare chips from
Oatleyelectronics, or similar relatively cheaply.  This applies to both
A and B

Question Number 3)
Does anyone have any experience with the command line format for the
types of flash utilities (cross finger and hope the bios chips are OK
but have lost video support[3]) so that I can have a good idea that the
command in the autoexec is likely to work...


Question number 4)
assuming that this is not actually the problem and that there is a
further issue, does anyone have access to a POST card?


[1] System A:  Asus P/I P55T2P4 R3.10 with Award Bios 1995 PCI/PNP 586
on a FLASH P28F001 BXT0302 chip
System B: Gigabyte GA-686LX Rev 1D with Award Bios 1997 PCI/PNP 686 -
have not ripped the stickers off to see the chip make/model yet - it is
a longer chip than the Asus chip (the board actually has 2 bios chip
slots - one long, the second shorter (suits the chip size in system A).

[2] No smoke escaped, but the chip got hot enough to distort the sticker
on the outside of the chip... and it don't work no more even to boot
block stage w/- video.  basically I put the chip in backwards *shrug*.


-- 
Dr Paul van den Bergen
SERC, RMIT University
paul at serc.rmit.edu.au
+613 9925 1624 phone
+613 9925 5699 fax
goofey: bulwynkl




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