[LinuxBIOS] MSI-K7N2GM-L, Athlon XP, NVidia chipset bootable?

[dedmons]

Hi all,

I looked into LinuxBios many years ago, but never
tried to burn a new BIOS.

Now, given that many appear to be flashable onboard
by the motherboard itself, I decided to give it another
look.

My machines motherboard has the following:

board: MSI-K7N2GM-L, Athlon XP, NVidia chipset
MS-6777/G (v1.x) M-ATC
Socket-462

Inside I found the following numbers:

1) Pheonix Bios D686(?) Bios 18195747
2) Nvidia NForce2 MCP F85055-R4 0348A4
3) WinBond W83627HF-AW

The book also lists these two:
4) Realtek RTL8201bl
5) VIA VT6307
6) nVidia NForce2 400/IGP

The board has an on-board AGP card, but I'm using
a Matrox G450 dual-head.

I have noted that LinuxBios lists the following as being
supported (flashrom):
NVIDIA MCP55 OK

and in V2
Winbond™ W83627HF ?

I'll continue researching to see if I'll have to Burn
or Flash the LinuxBios, but the book seems to
indicate it is flashable. Hopefully, LinuxBios will
too.

Thanks.

Dale

[Uwe Hermann]

Hi,

On Tue, Feb 13, 2007 at 06:21:32AM -0800, dedmons wrote:
> I looked into LinuxBios many years ago, but never
> tried to burn a new BIOS.
>
> Now, given that many appear to be flashable onboard
> by the motherboard itself, I decided to give it another
> look.

Hm, I don't know enough about these things, but: I'm not sure
that once you flash your own image on the BIOS chip it will
still be able to be flashed "on-board" as it was before!?

Is this flash-code in an extra ROM (or similar) so that it's protected
from being overwritten?

You should prepare a backup of your original BIOS anyway,
IMHO. You could get another BIOS chip (they cost ca. 5 bucks or so)
and flash your original BIOS on that, then test it.

You can then use our flashrom tool to flash any images you like...
> My machines motherboard has the following:
>
> board: MSI-K7N2GM-L, Athlon XP, NVidia chipset

Which chipset exactly?

The mainboard per se is not yet supported, but some parts of your
hardware are.
> Pheonix Bios D686(?) Bios 18195747

This is not relevant. You need to peel off the sticker
from the BIOS. Then you'll see some ID numbers which identify
the chip itself.
> Nvidia NForce2 MCP F85055-R4 0348A4

Ugh, sorry, I can't say anything about this. I hate these marketing
names for chipsets, I never know which "real" names of the chips they
refer to... Is there some official/complete list somewhere?

As for NVIDIA, we currently support MCP55 and Ck804.
> WinBond W83627HF-AW

Yep, that's supported. This means you could get out serial (debugging)
output from the board.

Uwe.