Flashing Bios Success...

Nathanael Noblet nathanael at gnat.ca
Wed Apr 30 11:44:00 CEST 2003


Hello all,
	So I've been trying for quite some time to gain access to the bios of 
the SBC I'm using so I can start placing linuxbios on it. Unable to get 
flash_rom to work and devbios segfaulting in some pci detection 
functions I was a little stuck. I didn't have a floppy drive on that 
SBC so couldn't use the uniflash dos programmer. Well I have found a 
way to get a dos boot and the uniflasher working. I have saved the 
original bios to file, and then flashed a fresh bios with the saved 
bios and its all working great. So though I would love to get flash_rom 
working or devbios for that matter. So now I'd like to know how to 
proceed. I have a build that builds I really have no idea how 
functional it is, and I fully expect some bugs. What I would LIKE to do 
right now is flash the flash chip with linuxbios (ignoring the kernel 
for the moment) just to see if it initializes the serial output etc as 
I want it to. So I've looked over the HOWTOs for the other boards. My 
board has a DoC, but I don't want to use it yet.

So I assumed that I need to flash linuxbios or linuxbios.strip onto the 
flash. I tried, but uniflash gives me an error #100 unable to read 
file???

As well, my flash is 256K and the linuxbios is 24K... do I need to pad 
it? As well when I do the STD_FLASH,ROM_SIZE options and such the 
romimage is still 900K. I though originally that I would put the 
romimage on the flash.. it is obviously too big...

The last question I have is the boot block in the flash chip itself 
there are two 8K boot blocks at the beginning and end of the flash, 
does something specific go in that area of the flash?

So can anyone enlighten me on the next step?
-- 
Nathanael Noblet
Gnat Solutions
4604 Monterey Ave NW
Calgary, AB
T3B 5K4

T/F 403.288.5360
C 403.809.5368

http://www.gnat.ca/




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