[flashrom] Tyan S2915 OEM / HP xw9400 now supported

Michael Karcher flashrom at mkarcher.dialup.fu-berlin.de
Tue Jun 1 18:13:07 CEST 2010


Am Dienstag, den 01.06.2010, 17:22 +0200 schrieb Nicolas AVELINE:
> On a forum i have seen that you should link pin 7 and 32 of the rom
> chip. this disable write protection.
You wouldn't have needed to do that, if you applied the patch from
http://patchwork.coreboot.org/patch/1426/ (very recent).

> So flashrom was able to write, but did stop at 0xF000.
Because your chips has *two* regions. The main region is 0..0xEFFFF, and
protected by pin 7 (#WP), while the boot block region is
0xF0000..0xFFFFF and protected by pin 8 (#TBL - Top Block Lock).

On the HP xw9400, #WP can be controlled by software, and the patch
mentioned above disables write protection using pin 7. I just committed
the patch as r1025. On the other hand, #TBL (pin 8) can not be
controlled in software. There is an unpopulated Jumper position on your
mainboard, next to the fuse F2. If you short these two pins (or connect
pins 8 and 32 of the flash chip), protection of the boot block is
disabled.

> Now my motherboard dont boot anymore.
That's because flashrom left the main block in an erased state when it
found out that the boot block can not be erased. When you had to cut
your BIOS, it's most likely Phoenix. You have chances that you can
recover if you connect a USB *floppy* drive (or an internal one, if your
board supports it) and put in a very special Phoenix Crisis Recovery
Disk. An USB flash drive does not work.

Regards,
  Michael Karcher





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