Dear Sir,
I had troubles in booting my system (ASUS A8N-Vm motherboard with AMI BIOS) ie. it would boot only every alternate times. So the first time I boot it, the motherboard seems to run fine (with all the necessary lights on and the cpu fan running) however there is no output on my monitor and the monitor power led simply keeps blinking. All I have to do is shut it down once by pressing the Power off/on button for long and then again switch on after which it boots simply fine. It doesnt seem to be because of cold start because even if i switch off my system after keeping it on for a long time, and try to boot it immediately, I have to again follow this procedure.I got my monitor tested and its fine. So i doubt my BIOS now. I tried updating it with Flashrom as follows and it results in error:
$ sudo flashrom -w /media/BACKUP/Backups/OS\ backups/windows/A8N-VM-ASUS-0902.ROM
flashrom v0.9.2-r1001 on Linux 2.6.31-ARCH (x86_64), built with libpci 3.1.7, GCC 4.5.0 20100520 (prerelease) flashrom is free software, get the source code at http://www.flashrom.org
No coreboot table found. Found chipset "NVIDIA MCP51", enabling flash write... OK. This chipset supports the following protocols: Non-SPI. Calibrating delay loop... OK. Found chip "SST SST49LF004A/B" (512 KB, FWH) at physical address 0xfff80000. Flash image seems to be a legacy BIOS. Disabling checks. Writing flash chip... Erasing flash chip... ERASE FAILED at 0x00000008! Expected=0xff, Read=0x90, failed byte count from 0x00000000-0x00000fff: 0xfe7 ERASE FAILED! ERASE FAILED at 0x00000008! Expected=0xff, Read=0x90, failed byte count from 0x00000000-0x0000ffff: 0xfefe ERASE FAILED! FAILED! ERASE FAILED! FAILED! Your flash chip is in an unknown state. Get help on IRC at irc.freenode.net (channel #flashrom) or mail flashrom@flashrom.org! ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- DO NOT REBOOT OR POWEROFF!
Now I am not able to decide what is to be done. I am not sure if I ran the commands properly or if the BIOS chip is fine or not. I hereby request you to please guide me and help me overcome this problem and get my PC running fine. I shall be looking forward to your reply with crossed fingers.
Thanking you in advance.
Am Mittwoch, den 21.07.2010, 07:57 +0530 schrieb Ajay Pai P: :
$ sudo flashrom -w /media/BACKUP/Backups/OS\ backups/windows/A8N-VM-ASUS-0902.ROM
flashrom v0.9.2-r1001 on Linux 2.6.31-ARCH (x86_64), built with libpci 3.1.7, GCC 4.5.0 20100520 (prerelease) flashrom is free software, get the source code at http://www.flashrom.org
No coreboot table found. Found chipset "NVIDIA MCP51", enabling flash write... OK. This chipset supports the following protocols: Non-SPI. Calibrating delay loop... OK. Found chip "SST SST49LF004A/B" (512 KB, FWH) at physical address 0xfff80000. Flash image seems to be a legacy BIOS. Disabling checks. Writing flash chip... Erasing flash chip... ERASE FAILED at 0x00000008! Expected=0xff, Read=0x90, failed byte count from 0x00000000-0x00000fff: 0xfe7 ERASE FAILED! ERASE FAILED at 0x00000008! Expected=0xff, Read=0x90, failed byte count from 0x00000000-0x0000ffff: 0xfefe
Sorry for the late reply. Most flashrom people are living in Europe and just were sleeping while sent your message.
Now I am not able to decide what is to be done. I am not sure if I ran the commands properly or if the BIOS chip is fine or not.
You ran the command properly, and very likely your BIOS chip is unchanged. The error you are getting is a typical symptom of a board adding write/erase protection that has to be removed in a board-specific way.
flashrom r1001 (the last official release) does not yet know the Asus A8N-VM, but support for a mainboard called "Asus A8N-VM CSM" has been added in the SVN revision r1064 (and fixed to really work in r1071). Please upgrade to the current development release and retry. Instructions for installing it can be found at http://flashrom.org/Downloads . It does not matter whether you use svn for downloading or download a snapshot. If the "A8N-VM" is different from the "A8N-VM CSM", it still could fail, though. In that case, please send us
a) the output of flashrom -V b) the output of lspci -vvvxxxnn (run as root) c) the output of superiotool -deV (http://www.coreboot.org/Superiotool#Installation ) d) a link to an official BIOS download of your mainboard.
This information can be used to add support for your mainboard to flashrom.
Regards, Michael Karcher
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Ajay Pai P: -
Michael Karcher