[LinuxBIOS] Questions to flashing BIOS chips

[Thomas Buschhardt]

Hallo Peter,

in the short: the timing of the read/write-process was wrong and the 
galep-producer change his software ;-)
its so easy sometimes ....
...no protection

Thomas

Peter Stuge schrieb:
> Hey,
>
> On Wed, Aug 15, 2007 at 01:54:59PM +0200, Thomas Buschhardt wrote:
>   
>>> It is quite likely that the different sample BIOS images from the
>>> vendors are different, even if for the same hardware.
>>>       
>> Of course they differ, but if I read 1 chip 3 times and compare the
>> bin's - they differ too :-(
>>     
>
> Ouch. Do they differ a lot? Can you run xxd on them and then diff?
>
> Bit errors indeed start showing when the chip has been through
> (quite) a few erase/rewrite cycles. I had not heard about that
> write protection idea before.
>
>
>   
>>> Can you get a few other flash chips for further testing?
>>>       
>> Today I telephone with the Galep producer and he said - some chip
>> vendors use a "writeprotection technic" that u cant use the free
>> samples to burn your own image on it. I order some new (clean ;-))
>> chips. I understand these method, because one of these vendor
>> (www.insydesw.com) offer 50 chips for free - its quite a lot of
>> money (1 chip is about 5.90 EUR).
>>     
>
> If you are a company and have a budget for more than just a few chips
> you can usually get a decent deal for 30 chips (one tube) from the
> local component distributors.
>
> Price goes down a lot when quantity goes up, so I doubt Insyde is
> paying very much.. :)
>
>
> //Peter
>
>