Ron. What flash parts are supported by your hotswap trick?
we've never seen one that won't work. So an SST 29 020 ought to work.
Perhaps the question I should have asked is what chip Mfg and types are supported by your flashing program. Not just the hotswap. All the flashes have different programming sequences so I don't see how they all could just work.
Ollie Lo calls this the 'infamous hot plug-and-play'. It scared me the first time I tried it, but in 5 years I've never seen it fail.
I'm not really that suprised. We hotswap a lot of stuff thats not really setup for that. As long as you don't short and address line or data line the system dosn't care if the chip is there or not at that stage since its all been shadowed. Occasionaly though it does bite.
The trick is to read the speed grade. Make sure the part you get is as fast as the part you're replacing. This bit me on one board I had.
Yeah if you grabbed a slow 120ns part that would cause you some issues.
You should only need a speed grade that is as fast as the ISA bus. <= 90ns should pretty much work. Unless its using some different method of reading the bios out thats faster than an ISA cycle.
However this may also mean that once they are set they will never change. So you might be able to put in the BIOS that came with the board. Set your settings and then use LinuxBIOS after that.
This could explain a problem we had with a via vt5426 once. We asked the fuctory bios to overclock. The board never came back; after that point it could only be booted with linuxbios.
Overclock the FSB or the CPU?