Hi Alan,
intorders@cox.net wrote:
Hello, I'm very interested on flashing my laptop,
..
The chipset lists as ATI RS690/RS690M, Southbridge is ATI SB600.
This combination is supported by coreboot. There is a lot of code and it works well on at least a couple of boards.
..
STEP 3: superiotool -dV does not report any i/o chip
STEP 4: Unknown type device, flashrom -V hangs needing a hard power cycle.
STEP 5: Unknown
STEP 6: No further information available.
Now, the lack of information here suggests that you have some work to do, to create a development environment for this system.
And yes, you will need to find a way to recover from images that don't work. Presumably this has an SPI flash chip. You could go for an SPI flash emulator, some developers are using the Dediprog SF-100 with success. You would de-solder the current flash chip, and solder wires to the SF-100 instead.
So, the laptop could possibly be made to work with coreboot, but it is nowhere near as simple as just flashing a new firmware. You will need to dig in and do some development.
You could run into catastrophic trouble with the EC, but it could also be simple to deal with. You would have to try, to know.
//Peter