Failing to WRITE an eeprom image to an "SST25VF512(A)" eeprom using a Bus Pirate (under Linux)

[Adam Ward]

(Flashrom Logfile attached)

I'm having great difficulty performing a "-w" operation on an SST25VF512(A)
chip using my Bus Pirate under Linux.

My hardware is as follows:
A brand new EEPROM (fresh from the tube) is *carefully* soldered onto a SMD
SOIC8 breakout board / programming harness I made, the ribbon going to the
bus pirate is less than 80mm long.  There is a 0.1 uF decoupling ceramic
cap very close to the power pins on the IC.  I have verified that the IC is
receiving 3.3 V from the Bus Pirate.  There are no shorts or stray flying
wires anywhere.  I have tried turning the speed all the way down to
"spispeed=30k" and the behaviour is the same.  I believe the pinouts are
all correct as it looks like the flashrom program can read data from the
chips.

I have tried 3 separate EEPROM chips (all the same type) just in cast I had
exceeded the write endurance of the silicon.  They all fail in the same way
but one of them managed to get to the 5th block before it hanged.

The log file I have attached just stops at the last line and never gets any
further.

Can someone suggest a reason for this failure?  I really need to get this
working.  I can provide photos of the setup if that would help.

Adam