[coreboot] Tinkering with old and new motherboards

Oliver Schinagl oliver+list at schinagl.nl
Fri Jul 13 13:02:17 CEST 2012


On 13-07-12 13:27, David Griffith wrote:
> On Fri, 13 Jul 2012, Oliver Schinagl wrote:
>
>> On 13-07-12 12:14, David Griffith wrote:
>>>
>>> I have an old motherboard which I'd like to experiment on and have 
>>> my eyes on a bleeding-edge board.  The old one is a Shuttle AN35N 
>>> Ultra (socket 1). The new one is an MSI 990FXA-GD80V2 (socket AM3+). 
>>> Neither of these appear on the list of supported motherboards.
>>>
>>> Tinkering with the old board should be relatively safe because the 
>>> BIOS lives in a socketed PLCC.  I can't seem to figure out what sort 
>>> of package the firmware in the newer one lives in. None of the 
>>> photos I've found of it seem to have good enough resolution to 
>>> tell.  Can I get some help here?
>>>
>> I found 
>> http://www.msi.com/pic/product/five_pictures1_2400_20110531112742.jpg
>>
>> and I have to agree, the resolution is a bit to low to recognize the 
>> bios on.
>>
>> My personal 'best bet' is the 'green' chip in the left bottom corner. 
>> If you look at the south-bridge heat-sink, under the middle leg of 
>> the 'm' there's a small SOIC8 chip with a green sticker. It is 
>> surrounded by 3 caps. That's the most logical bet, as the sticker 
>> probably has bios version number on it.
>
> I think I see it.  In the bottom-left there is a white fan header 
> labeled "SYSFAN4".  Just northeast of that is the chip.  Am I right?
Yep, that's what I spotted.
>
> I thought I was going to have to jerry-rig something messy to replace 
> the SOIC8 with a socket of some sort, but I see that someone[1] found 
> a source of compact and relatively affordable sockets.  The clearance 
> with that 10-pin header just south of the firmware chip looks rather 
> tight.  I also see some adapters that puts a socket on an SOIC 
> footprint and then a DIP adapter is plugged in.
>
That looks really interesting. I wonder how much those are going for on 
ebay. I also have a HP N36L/N40L microserver that I would love to see 
coreboot running on. But since the bios is a SOIC8 i've been putting it 
off. May try the PCI Raid adapter boot trick once I find it in my box of 
junk.
>
> [1] http://randomprojects.org/wiki/SOIC8_socket
>
>






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