Hello I have received shipment of my epia flash. Although my flash came with an SST chip. www.badflash.com sent me a Windbond chip. I was a little worried, but after using flash_rom to extract the original bios. I proceeded to flash this new chip. It all worked. I rebooted and everything is as it should be. It is unfortunate that I had to pay $10 to find this out, since I have 10 of those chips here for another project. The chip sent is W29C020CP90B. So as to let others know, you can use those in replacement of the original BIOS chip on the EPIA-800. I would suspect that the EPIA-500 and such would also work, but well can't guarantee it.
Now on to flashing linuxBIOS to these chips... How exciting... I wonder though if it is prudent to do this at 1am...;) oh well.
At 01:06 18.09.2003 -0600, you wrote:
Hi Nathanael!
the original bios. I proceeded to flash this new chip. It all worked. I rebooted and everything is as it should be. It is unfortunate that I had to pay $10 to find this out, since I have 10 of those chips here for another project. The chip sent is W29C020CP90B. So as to let others know, you can use those in replacement of the original BIOS chip on the EPIA-800. I would suspect that the EPIA-500 and such would also work, but well can't guarantee it.
Of course you can use FlashROMs other than the 39SF020A for all EPIA boards. I installed an AMD AM29F040B-55JI in an EPIA5000 and everything is working great! Just download the datasheet of your chip and compare the pinout/voltages with the pinout/voltages of the original FlashROM. If all signals and the access time are the same (or better/faster), you can use it.
BUT: It's possible, that the original EPIA flashwriter software (running under DOS or Windows) is only capable of writing the 39sf020a chips, because they didn't implement other FlashROM programming algorithms. The flashwriter which is included in the Linuxbios package is capable of programming (nearly) all FlashROMs.
Best regards,
Sven
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Nathanael Noblet -
Sven Lübke