Part ASD 29F2008

[Néstor a.k.a. DarkMan]

Hi,
I tried an ASD 29F2008 part and is recognized as a Winbond W29C020C. It fails at erase operation. How can I help to support the device?

Motherboard: Shuttle AV11V30
Processor: Pentium III
Chipset: Via Apollo Pro 133
Software version: flashrom v0.9.2-r1017 on Linux 2.6.24-27-generic
(i686), built with libpci 2.2.4, GCC 4.2.4 (Ubuntu 4.2.4-1ubuntu4),
little endian

Greetings.

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[Michael Karcher]

Am Freitag, den 28.05.2010, 20:14 +0200 schrieb Néstor a.k.a. DarkMan:
> Hi,
> I tried an ASD 29F2008 part and is recognized as a Winbond W29C020C.

This is not surprising. ASD (at least at that time) sold relabeled parts
from other vendors. Maybe also 2nd source manufacturing.
> It fails at erase operation. How can I help to support the device?

It's not a problem of the flash chip, but...
> Motherboard: Shuttle AV11V30

... of the mainboard, or the BIOS code. Your flash chip has an optional
boot block protection mode. If that mode is active, programming in the
boot block and, this is what you observe, the chip erase instruction
(which would also erase the boot block) is ignored by the flash chip.
This also applies to the vendor flash tool, so please check that you
don't have flashing disabled by a jumper or a setup option.

Regards,
  Michael Karcher

[Michael Karcher]

Am Samstag, den 29.05.2010, 00:30 +0200 schrieb Michael Karcher
(myself):
> > Motherboard: Shuttle AV11V30
>
> ... of the mainboard, or the BIOS code. Your flash chip has an optional
> boot block protection mode. If that mode is active, programming in the
> boot block and, this is what you observe, the chip erase instruction
> (which would also erase the boot block) is ignored by the flash chip.
> This also applies to the vendor flash tool, so please check that you
> don't have flashing disabled by a jumper or a setup option.

I just have seen that you did flash other flash chips successfully. Also
the boot block protect mode will not be active after hot-swapping,
because it is reset by power cycling. The behaviour you are observing is
indeed interesting: We can be sure that write cycles reach the chip, as
otherwise, probing would not have worked, but the chip does not respond
to the erase command.

Also we have confirmed working erase on the original Winbond chip. So
currently I am out of ideas why this chip does not erase.

Regards,
  Michael Karcher