At Sat, 29 Jan 2011 18:43:10 -0800 (PST), Neo The User neotheuser@ymail.com wrote:
The motherboard's chip is Winbond W25Q80, 1024 KB.
I also have ASUS M3A78-EM mobo with chip "Macronix MX25L8005" (1024 KB, SPI). Is it a good idea to hot swap these chips to try to recover? Are they interchangeable?
They are both serial flash devices and in theory, should work. I personally have a MX25L8005 as well on my 785 board and it works fine with Flashrom.
However keep in mind that the BIOS stored on the MX25L8005 will NOT work on the ASRock board because the CPU sockets are different and among other things, but when you re-flash the chips, the data is overwritten anyway with whatever you just flashed it with.
Thank you very much for your response! I did hot swapping successfully and will now be able to boot anyways in case of disaster. I will also try to find identical backup chips for my motherboards to make recovery easier.