Ron sugested that I use FILO for my project and I have had a trawl around to find filo, and have downloaded a BZ from a fairly unreputable looking web site. Does anyone have the "official" website address at all?
No fancy graphics, but effective none the less.
Also Ron said to configure LinuxBIOS for the 530, but I thought that it was not supported by the LinuxBIOS project.
Hmm, might've been thinking of the SiS630.
may need some more explicit instructions: do I assume correctly that I need to flash my current 530 board bios with LinuxBIOS with a payload of filo and have filo point to boot off HDA1?
Correct.
Then this leads me onto another question: can I pull a bios chip from another PC and use that to flash LB onto to use with the 530, or are some regions of the BIOS chip un-writable and/or mobo specific? If the latter then would it not be safer to get a small DoC and flash that, as I only have one 530 Mobo.
Yes, you may use another PC for flashing. I do that all the time here at LANL since I usually render my target machine unbootable and have to use another machine to flash a part to fix it :) Be careful, you might run into compatibility issues going between machines having to do with the type of programmer the southbridge uses (parallel programming mode or LPC). And you might have to use MTD to flash on an old southbridge like the 530.