I wonder, did anyone try Coreboot and SeaBIOS on Gigabyte's GA-M52S-S3P?
I'm mainly interested in booting Linux 2.6-based GNU system via GRUB 2 from a SATA HDD (with GPT), but I'd like to have other boot devices (floppy and DVD drives, USB Flash) and systems supported as well.
One more issue is that the BIOS IC (labelled MX 25L4005AM2C) is soldered to the board. I wonder, what'd be the recovery procedure should the newly uploaded firmware fail to boot?
TIA.
The backstory is as follows. Suddenly, the vendor's BIOS has decided that it needs a backup. Without hesitation, it choose one of the HDD's attached, and wrote its copy there, reserving some 2113 sectors at its tail as a “Host Protected Area” (HPA.) Effectively, this has invalidated the drive's GPT, rendering the system unbootable. Seemingly, no data (apart from the backup GPT) was lost, but I'd like to avoid the surprises like this in the future.
As I was unable to find the relevant BIOS configuration software for AwardBIOS, I'm now looking if I should abandon such a misbehaved variety of proprietary firmware completely for something free.