I was preparing to flash an ECS NForce4-A939 motherboard with Linuxbios using advice I received earlier this week on this mailing list. Since the bios chip is a surface mount package, I have no easy way of restoring the original manufacturer bios image should I flash an invalid rom image to the motherboard.
To minimize my risk, I planned to flash a Gigabyte motherboard with a similar chipset configuration, just to prove my image would theoreticaly work on the ECS board. This motherboard has something called Dualbios, which essentially allows you to boot from a secondary bios image should something go wrong. However, I noticed that to activate this feature and access the backup BIOS image, you had to enter the CMOS setup for the motherboard, whereas I initally assumed the backup mechanism was jumper activated.
So my questions are:
1. Does anyone know if the Gigabyte Dualbios feature will still work once I flash the primary bios image with Linuxbios. If so, it would allow me to recover if my first image is bad. I don't see how it would work, since I assume Linuxbios will overwrite any recovery logic, rendering the backup bios image inaccessible.
2. Other than using a fallback image in my Linuxbios image, or using this Dualbios feature, are there any other economical ways to recover from a bad Linuxbios flash, when dealing with a non-socketed bios chip?
I just have this sinking feeling that I'll flash my MB, and end up with a $75 brick, hence these questions...
Thanks, Brad Brown
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MSI does the same thing with their dual BIOS approach--I found out the hard way from purchasing a K8N-Neo3. My advice is to avoid these gimmicky 0v3rc!0ck3r BIOSes and get a BIOS Savior RD-1 or something if you can get your hands on a socketed mainboard.
Or, I think someone on this list (Bari Ari?) can modify your board to use socketed flash parts as well.
--David
On 12/27/05, David Hendricks cro_marmot@comcast.net wrote:
MSI does the same thing with their dual BIOS approach--I found out the hard way from purchasing a K8N-Neo3. My advice is to avoid these gimmicky 0v3rc!0ck3r BIOSes and get a BIOS Savior RD-1 or something if you can get your hands on a socketed mainboard.
If you can find out what the address is that the recovery image jumps to after boot then it seems possible to add Linuxbios there without nuking your recovery code.
You would have to modify the flash programer to not erase the sections where your recovery stuff was and add some sort of offset ability as well.
Or, I think someone on this list (Bari Ari?) can modify your board to use socketed flash parts as well.
Is the flash a PLCC or TSOP?
-- Richard A. Smith
Oops--I forgot that I'm not running my old crappy mainboard anymore and my current one *does* have a socketed PLCC.
Richard does have a good idea, though. Yhlu added a start and end exclusion option to flash rom to specify which portions of the ROM to erase and reprogram. I have not tried it yet as this patch was made specifically for the pm49fl004 (The standard ROM on a bunch of Tyan boards). I also seem to recall that this required IO chipset support for legacy programming mode, but I could be wrong on that point. Still, perhaps this would help out Mr. Brown if it could be adapted to whatever his board uses.
PS -- Sorry for the dupe, Richard!
On Wed, 28 Dec 2005 00:06:18 -0600 Richard Smith smithbone@gmail.com wrote:
On 12/27/05, David Hendricks cro_marmot@comcast.net wrote:
MSI does the same thing with their dual BIOS approach--I found out the hard way from purchasing a K8N-Neo3. My advice is to avoid these gimmicky 0v3rc!0ck3r BIOSes and get a BIOS Savior RD-1 or something if you can get your hands on a socketed mainboard.
If you can find out what the address is that the recovery image jumps to after boot then it seems possible to add Linuxbios there without nuking your recovery code.
You would have to modify the flash programer to not erase the sections where your recovery stuff was and add some sort of offset ability as well.
Or, I think someone on this list (Bari Ari?) can modify your board to use socketed flash parts as well.
Is the flash a PLCC or TSOP?
-- Richard A. Smith
David Hendricks wrote:
Or, I think someone on this list (Bari Ari?) can modify your board to use socketed flash parts as well.
If there is enough room around the tsop flash device on the mainboard, the flash device may be replaced by a ZIF tsop socket. Such as one by:
http://www.emulation.com/catalog/off-the-shelf_solutions/sockets/tsop/
http://www.emulation.com/pdf/skt518.pdf
The tsop zif sockets are larger than the tsop package so you need the extra space to solder them in place.
-Bari
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