"ERASED FAILED!" messages for ICH2 / SST49LF0002A/B

[Allan Bjorklund]

Hello,

I'm wanting to upgrade the BIOS on an older machine that I have.  A Sony Vaio (PCV-RX650(UC)), with an ASUSTeK mother board (P4B266LM Rev: 1.xx), running Linux 
kernel 2.6.28.

Running flashrom (today's trunk version) with no arguments gives this:

flashrom v0.9.1-runknown
No coreboot table found.
Found chipset "Intel ICH2", enabling flash write... OK.
This chipset supports the following protocols: Non-SPI.
Calibrating delay loop... OK.
Found chip "SST SST49LF002A/B" (256 KB, FWH) at physical address 0xfffc0000.
No operations were specified.

I saved a copy of my existing BIOS image with: flashrom -r original_bios.bin

That appears to work, as the file is the same size as the updated BIOS .bin file I downloaded from the vendor's site.

To test writing, I attempted to write the original BIOS image back with flashrom -w original_bios.bin, and here is the output:

flashrom v0.9.1-runknown
No coreboot table found.
Found chipset "Intel ICH2", enabling flash write... OK.
This chipset supports the following protocols: Non-SPI.
Calibrating delay loop... OK.
Found chip "SST SST49LF002A/B" (256 KB, FWH) at physical address 0xfffc0000.
Flash image seems to be a legacy BIOS. Disabling checks.
Writing flash chip... ERASE FAILED at 0x00000000! Expected=0xff, Read=0x25, failed byte count from 0x00000000-0x00003fff: 0x3fa4
ERASE FAILED!
ERASE FAILED!
ERASE FAILED!
ERASE FAILED!
FAILED!
Your flash chip is in an unknown state.
Get help on IRC at irc.freenode.net channel #flashrom or
mail [e-mail]
------------------------------------------------------------
DO NOT REBOOT OR POWEROFF!

If I do a flashrom -v original_bios.bin, I get:

flashrom v0.9.1-runknown
No coreboot table found.
Found chipset "Intel ICH2", enabling flash write... OK.
This chipset supports the following protocols: Non-SPI.
Calibrating delay loop... OK.
Found chip "SST SST49LF002A/B" (256 KB, FWH) at physical address 0xfffc0000.
Flash image seems to be a legacy BIOS. Disabling checks.
Verifying flash... VERIFIED.

And reading a second copy and doing a binary diff shows no differences, so my BIOS checks out as not being damaged.  (At least, I think so.)

So, any advice on what to look for/change to make this work?

Thanks.

--Allan