more question on flash on 440gx

[Ronald G. Minnich]

well, curiouser and curioser.

There's a flash with a 20-bit address space. There's an 8086 addressing
mode with 20 bits. There's lots of ISA and VGA and other junk populating
that 20 bit space, leaving either 64k, 128k, or at most 256k of address
space for the flash (see the 440gx bridge manual: you can go with standard
64k bios, extended bios, or some other mode which lets you get a 256k
bios).

OK, so how the heck do you read/write flash? The utility runs in DOS mode.
What's it doing? Is 75% of that flash memory wasted? (hard to believe ...)
Is there a bank register somewhere? Also, how do you get to address 0 on
flash if the only addresses you can use are f0000, e0000, and c0000? does
intel remap address lines? Anybody found a reference schematic for this
motherboard? developer.intel.com is short on specifics ...

This is all very odd. DEC sure got it right on their motherboards, at
least according to the devbios driver.

Anybody know of a cheap nvram for the PCI bus so we can continue testing
while we figure this out?

ron

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[Jeff Garzik]

"Ronald G. Minnich" wrote:
> Anybody know of a cheap nvram for the PCI bus so we can continue testing
> while we figure this out?

Well, I just killed the BIOS on my old Intel i430FX

Does anybody know a good source of replacement BIOS chips?  I have a
feeling I might need a few, and maybe an EEPROM burner too.

Jeff

[Matthew Sullivan]

Hi,

There is an easy way (assuming you have a good BIOS chip)...

1/ Place the good BIOS in the M/B (preferably in a ZIF socket)
2/ Boot machine to DOS prompt.
3/ Hot Swap BIOS chips.
(Some motherboards need to have the 'copy BIOS to Shadow RAM' flag set at this
point - you'll soon work it out ;-})
4/ Put good BIOS away safely for future reference.
5/ Use BIOS utility tool from Award or AMI to 'blow' a good BIOS.
6/ Reboot.

;-)

Yours

Mat

Jeff Garzik wrote:
> "Ronald G. Minnich" wrote:
> > Anybody know of a cheap nvram for the PCI bus so we can continue testing
> > while we figure this out?
>
> Well, I just killed the BIOS on my old Intel i430FX
>
> Does anybody know a good source of replacement BIOS chips?  I have a
> feeling I might need a few, and maybe an EEPROM burner too.
>     Jeff
>
> To unsubscribe: send mail to [e-mail]
> with 'unsubscribe openbios' in the body of the message

Matthew

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More Computer Terminology
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Windows: Point, press and panic!

[Ronald G. Minnich]

On Mon, 24 Jan 2000, Matthew Sullivan wrote:
> Hi,
>
> There is an easy way (assuming you have a good BIOS chip)...
>
> 1/ Place the good BIOS in the M/B (preferably in a ZIF socket)
> 2/ Boot machine to DOS prompt.
> 3/ Hot Swap BIOS chips.

It's a good idea except for newer motherboards which have surface mount
(non-socketed) BIOS chips.

ron

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[Ronald G. Minnich]

> Well, I just killed the BIOS on my old Intel i430FX

Sorry, I don't know about that mboard. Is this an NVRAM? Is it socketed or
surface mount?

What's the part #
ron

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