Hi Kevin. I am skeptical that a beginner solderer could pull that off. It's very very tiny work. However, a couple of us have contacted the following gentleman, and his company gets the job done well and cheaply (expect to pay a few hundred, which is preferred to a few dead motherboards).
Henry Ho of Century Technology, Inc. hho * century-technology * com 650 583 8908
There's no problem using an eprom programmer if you write a bad flash, but its easier to just have a spare tsop flash chip (intel firmware hubs and standard flash chips aren't interchangable however).
- Adam Agnew
On Sat, 27 Sep 2003, Kevin O'Connor wrote:
Hi,
I have a motherboard that I would like to get linuxbios working on. Unfortunately, it has a TSOP flash part that is soldered directly onto it. I am concerned that if I write to the flash I may turn the unit into a "brick".
Has anyone had any experience with removing a surface mounted flash TSOP part, and replacing it with a ZIF socket? If I understand it correctly, I should be able to heat up the leads of the current flash (melting the existing solder), extract the flash part, then solder on a zif socket (http://www.emulation.com/catalog/off-the-shelf_solutions/sockets/tsop/), and then finally use an eprom programmer on the existing tsop flash chip if it ever gets flashed incorrectly. Is this correct - anyone here done this before? Is this procedure very tricky (can one new to soldering expect to succeed at it)?
Any advice would be appreciated, -Kevin
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