[LinuxBIOS] My very own homemade BIOS saviour

Luis Correia luis.f.correia at gmail.com
Wed Apr 11 00:56:19 CEST 2007


Hi!

after some time being absent from here while attending o some other
pressing issues, i'm back to LinuxBIOS :)

My NOVA-4899R needs a proper bios and i'm confident that this time it
would get better.

But as always, problem is swaping the BIOS with enough confidence.
After ruining onf my my precious BIOS chips, I decided on a radical
approach.

Here is the photo (sorry for the hosting), and the explanation follows:
http://img156.imageshack.us/img156/7942/detail01hd8.jpg

This is composed of a BIOS with a PLCC socket soldered on top (all
pins except #CE)

Then, the #CE signal is intercepted and routed to a switch, which in
turn selects the upper or lower chip.

After the first boot and using uniflash as a detecting software for
the parts, only one of the chips was correctly identified. Then it
struct me that while one chip was connected to the controller, the
other had the pin 'free floating'. This was solved by pulling the two
#CE pins from the flash devices to +5V.

This is a very dumb rig, but hey, it works.

I haven't flashed any on the chips yet, but now uniflash does detect
them correctly.

I'll be offline until the 20th but after that i'll try to post more
detailed pictures of it, along with a proper schematics.

Thanks for listeing to all this crap :)

Luis Correia




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