Hi Peter I said in an email to Corey about unbricking, that I think it might be possible to use the recovery part of the bios, appending that file from Intels own bios with a linuxbios. I'm not 100% sure that works but it might. I forgot to forward that message to the mailing list. Intels bios structure is divided in 64k parts and there are 3-4 (or more depending on size i guess) that is the bios. There are two that intels readme says is "recovery" bios (two identical files, two different places on the flash chip, I think) Then there is one which seems to have settings and "stuff". If I can include these recvery files, and place the linuxbios in the regular bios files (with intels header info to make their flash-program accept it), I don't see a reason why it shouldn't work. Intels flasher also has a function that checks validity of the files before flashing, so if there is a checksum or something in the header that has to match, I would be able to solve it or even bruteforce it to make it accept my files instead. The reason I'm looking at this way of handling things, and not just soldering a socket the first thing I do, is: 1) I'm lazy 2) This is the way it has to be done if there is ever going to be Intel OEM support, since their flasher is AFAIK the only one that can flash there chips. Regular users can't be expected to solder bios chips.
Thanks for the offer about the socket, but I'm too far away so I'll have to do it myself.
One last thing about 440bx. Since Rons assembly code from v1 works, why is it that it is so hard to port it to C? Is it a compiler bug/feature that makes it not work correctly or what is the exact problem? I've just started trying to understand this stuff and I read a post by Ron from 2004 where he had two boards working well apparently, he didn't mention any memory issues. If the working assembler code can be put in with the C code, and then change it line by line until it stops working, you should be able to pinpoint the problem right? Maybe my thinking is flawed, I'm not a good programmer.
2007/3/26, Peter Stuge stuge-linuxbios@cdy.org:
On Mon, Mar 26, 2007 at 01:09:57PM +0200, Oscar Molin wrote:
I have 2 Intel SE440BX and one Intel SE440bx-3 (it's some kind of subversion to sebx-2) These were very popular Intel OEM boards and were used by Dell, compaq, fujitsu and the like. If someone wants info on what chips they have etc I'm willing to be of assistance and help with testing code one them to make them work. Since they all have Intels soldered on flash chips you can't make too many mistakes but I have no problem losing one in the process as I don't need all of them.
I would wait with flashing until there was a practical way to unbrick the board. :) That said, 440BX is getting some work in v2, so more systems to test on would be great. If need be I could replace your flash with a socket. (I'm in Malmö)
//Peter
-- linuxbios mailing list linuxbios@linuxbios.org http://www.linuxbios.org/mailman/listinfo/linuxbios