Kevin,
Thank you for the information. I'll check if this equipment is usable for my hardware. The crucial thing is whether the BIOS chip is socketed or not. We'll see, at least I know the size is 2Mbit, since the latest BIOS binary (A6120IMS.200) supported by MSI is 261144kbyte. Does anybody have experience with removing a soldered chip on a motherboard without destroying anything?
I sent in an update enquiry about my BIOS version (AMI) to www.esupport.com and they offered me to purchase a new one, supporting modern CPUs and up to Windows XP, for around the same price as the "BIOS saviour" board costs. Since I'm only running Linux on this computer, I'm not interested in booting other OSes. I'm mostly interested to be able to upgrade the box with faster (dual) processors.
However, according to the answers obtained so far there seems to be no interest at all to make LinuxBIOS(V2) work with older motherboards, such as the widely spread 440BX-based ones. As mentioned in earlier postings, I'm willing to be a test pilot for this port, but I cannot do it without help from the LinuxBIOS developers.
Thanks, Svante
On Thu, 2004-04-01 at 02:46, Kevin O'Connor wrote:
On Wed, Mar 31, 2004 at 09:30:16PM +0200, Svante Signell wrote:
Is there a way to try out a new BIOS without risking to end up with an unbootable main-board, ethernet, serial port, some special card connected to the south-bridge (PIIX4) e.g. a special PCI/ISA card, etc? Other solutions including soldering, EEPROM programming devices, etc?
A number of people are using the "BIOS Savior" product with success. See: http://www.ioss.com.tw/eg/rd1/index.html
Depending on which part you need, you can mail order it from mwave.com, pcmods.com, or probably a bunch of other places.
-Kevin