Greetings,
If the flash is in a socket, no problem. Believe it or not, the PLCC flash chips can be hot swapped (power ON). So, the best approach is to use a spare chip for LinuxBIOS, and keep the original as a rescue chip.
You will need either a non-conductive chip extractor. Boot under the normal BIOS, pull it, and insert the spare. Program, reboot. If it fails, re-insert the original and try again. Most of the boards in the project were developed that way.
G'day, sjames
On Thu, 28 Nov 2002, Nathanael Noblet wrote:
On Thursday, November 28, 2002, at 01:54 PM, steven james wrote:
Greetings,
It won't be possable to just remove the flash. However, you can flash LinuxBIOS itself onto the plcc (square) flash, and have it load the payload (kernel) from the DoC. It should be mostly a matter of determining where the DOC is mapped intp memory.
Well that sounds promising. Although, if I don't get the linuxBIOS code just right, my machine is dead no? because I won't be able to get to a bootable floppy to restore the bios, and I cannot replace the bios chip with a known good one right?