On Thu, Aug 5, 2010 at 10:59 AM, Alec Wright alecjw@member.fsf.org wrote:
On 5 August 2010 15:46, Myles Watson mylesgw@gmail.com wrote:
The first step would be to test flashrom and your spare flash chip with the factory BIOS. Read the original, swap it out, and write the original to the spare. If it still boots, then there's no harm in trying other things.
Already tried flashing my bios with flashrom: it worked fine. I didn't know you could hotswap chips to reprogram them though: I thought I'd have to use an external programmer. Is there no risk of corrupting data on the chip as you remove it?
I won't say _no_ risk, but it's pretty safe. With a backup, I wouldn't worry about it at all.
I like using a pushpin best: http://www.coreboot.org/Developer_Manual/Tools#Chip_removal_tools
A bios savior can be nice, too.
Your northbridge and southbridge may also need some configuration before you can get serial debugging. If you look at SerialICE, it has several examples of minimal configurations to get serial working.
I'm not really familiar with serialICE, where can i find these examples? I looked in the source code but didnt find anything (might have been looking in the wrong place though)
Here are a couple of examples: no initialization: http://www.serialice.com/trac/serialice/browser/trunk/SerialICE/mainboard/qe... some initialization: http://www.serialice.com/trac/serialice/browser/trunk/SerialICE/mainboard/am... a little more: http://www.serialice.com/trac/serialice/browser/trunk/SerialICE/mainboard/ty...
Basically you take the minimal set of code that can initialize the serial port from Coreboot, and port it to SerialICE to support a new mainboard. The first two are simulators (qemu & simnow), so they're easy to play with.
Btw, sorry for replying directly to you last time. I didn't realise you'd sent the email to me and cc'ed it to the list, so I just idly hit reply and it sent directly to you.
No problem.
Myles