Well, I search a bit where the #init comes with no luck, it seems to get down into the deep blue sea :), it seems to come from inner layers of the board. I would like to be on a mistake but ...
Another option, cut the pin, uffff, but with which tool?, and worst, cut without broking any of the halves of the pin.
Time to lunch, :) I am going to start cutting the bread first, later we will see, bye.
On 4/12/07, Beth beth.null@gmail.com wrote:
Hi all again (hi ST, yes I am Jose, Beth is a long story :D, some day ...).
Well one week of holidays, half other with a lot of work and some days without batteries on the multimeter ..., I am back.
Well I am a bit "disconnected", but, ST are you still interested on that I check the pins of the second socket?.
What about your discoveries about the #init pin?
And talking about the #init, guys, have you seen the mail from Luis Correia??:
after some time being absent from here while attending o some other pressing issues, i'm back to LinuxBIOS :)
My NOVA-4899R needs a proper bios and I'm confident that this time it would get better.
But as always, problem is swapping the BIOS with enough confidence. After ruining onf my my precious BIOS chips, I decided on a radical approach.
Here is the photo (sorry for the hosting), and the explanation follows: http://img156.imageshack.us/img156/7942/detail01hd8.jpg
This is composed of a BIOS with a PLCC socket soldered on top (all pins except #CE)
Then, the #CE signal is intercepted and routed to a switch, which in turn selects the upper or lower chip.
After the first boot and using uniflash as a detecting software for the parts, only one of the chips was correctly identified. Then it struct me that while one chip was connected to the controller, the other had the pin 'free floating'. This was solved by pulling the two #CE pins from the flash devices to +5V.
This is a very dumb rig, but hey, it works.
I haven't flashed any on the chips yet, but now uniflash does detect them correctly.
I'll be offline until the 20th but after that i'll try to post more detailed pictures of it, along with a proper schematics.
Thanks for listeing to all this crap :)
Luis Correia
It's like my friend's idea but correctly done (I didn't realized that leaving vcc out will leave the pins "floating"). It seems to work, we don't have #ce pin, but will work on the same way our #init pin. Yesterday I received the new bios chip and a plcc socket so I will try it, first if you give me the ok (jejeje), I must find from where the #pin comes, cut and insert the switch to the chips ...
Another thing, ST, I bought the chip, an extraction tool and a socket from http://bios-repair.co.uk/ , I had a very fluid communication and no problems at all with Paul.
And, nothing more, see you. Regards.