[flashrom] Trial of ARIMA:HDAMA Motherboard

[Spangler, Mike T]

Carl -

  I've corrected my email and am now sending to the group.

> Of course I'd prefer it if you tried to flash coreboot (new name of
> LinuxBIOS) to these boards, but that's your choice. Anyway, you said you
> have the factory BIOS around somewhere. Is it the one at
> http://flextronics.com/arima/Server/Download/Download/HDAMA189.zip ?

I can't use flash coreboot (LinuxBIOS) because our cluster management tools require pxeboot.  We've transitioned away from it.  

So, the bios zip file above is correct, but I'm not using it.  It will not work for flashing a chip with LinuxBios.  The way I do this is to do a "flashrom -r" on a system with factory bios and then take that newly created flashrom file and do a "flashrom -w" with it on a board with LinuxBios.    This is the method we used with the old bios_copy software from Linux Networx, but that was extremely unreliable.

> Hmm ok. I think we have enough docs to iterate through all possible
> board enables. How many of these boards do you have (in case we trash
> the ROM of one of them)?

The ROM is removeable, so we only potentially trash a PLCC chip.  I have a half dozen or so spares.

Mike



-----Original Message-----
From: Carl-Daniel Hailfinger [mailto:c-d.hailfinger.devel.2006 at gmx.net] 
Sent: Friday, September 18, 2009 4:47 AM
To: Spangler, Mike T
Subject: Re: [flashrom] Trial of ARIMA:HDAMA Motherboard

Hi Mike,

was it intentional that you only sent the data to me? It would be great
to have that data on the list. If possible, please forward your mail to
the list so other developers can help as well.

On 18.09.2009 07:26, Spangler, Mike T wrote:
> Thanks for getting back to me. David Hendricks has been giving me some
> direction also, but has kind of exhausted his ideas. He suggested that
> I try something around revision 2000, because he thought that he was
> able to flash an ARIMA board successfully with that version. I also
> tried revision 2341 which had references in the Changelog to ARIMA.
> Turns out the results were identical. The results of rev 2000/2341 is
> that it flashes about 99% of the locations on the PLCC correctly.
> Below I will give you some output from the flashrom -w command. Also,
> I've included a comparison between the file I used to write to the
> flash chip and a new file that I reread from the flashed chip.

I analyzed the output and the only difference is that the new flashrom
version detects the problem and the old version ignores it...

> First I will give you what you wanted to know. The chip was originally
> factory bios. It was either flashed to LinuxBios with lbflash or with
> a standalone benchtop flasher. I'm trying to flash the chip back to
> factory bios.

Of course I'd prefer it if you tried to flash coreboot (new name of
LinuxBIOS) to these boards, but that's your choice. Anyway, you said you
have the factory BIOS around somewhere. Is it the one at
http://flextronics.com/arima/Server/Download/Download/HDAMA189.zip ?

> Output from superiotool -dV
>
> Node20:~/coreboot-v2-4645/util/superiotool # ./superiotool -dV
> superiotool r
> Found NSC PC87360 (sid=0xe1, srid=0x0f) at 0x2e
> Register dump:
> LDN 0x07 (GPIO)
> idx 30 60 61 70 71 74 75 f0 f1 f2
> val 00 00 00 00 03 04 04 00 44 01
> def 00 00 00 00 03 04 04 00 00 00

Hmm ok. I think we have enough docs to iterate through all possible
board enables. How many of these boards do you have (in case we trash
the ROM of one of them)?

Regards,
Carl-Daniel