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flashing bios, hot or not?
Is it possible to flash without hot swap?

New Messageflashing bios, hot or not? (modified 0 times) cheaphack
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I have been thinking if there is a way to flash a V5 BIOS from a good BIOS without a hot swap? My question: is it possible to :

1. boot an Iopener V5 with a known good BIOS and a hard disk with tools to format and set up the sandisk from boot.

2. Format the sandisk, put whatever operating system is necessary to run the flash program.

3. Power down, swap in original BIOS, power up.

Will the original BIOS boot the sandisk?
If it will, then I should be able to flash the BIOS, right?

I really dont want to try a hot swap, but is there ANY other way than getting badflash to flash me another BIOS (no offense to badflash intended ;^)?

Thanks

cheaphack

01-05-2001 16:53:57

New MessageRE:flashing bios, hot or not? (modified 0 times) mp3boombox
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No it wont. The bios has some code which makes it so the computer will not boot from any DEVICE which doesnt have a funky bootsector. Basicly the bios has been setup to boot ONLY to the QNX software. No way around it.

The only thing you can do is HOT swap a chip using a second IO which has a good bios chip or reflashed chip, then boot to DOS with that one load up the software to flash the bios chiop. Now remove the good chip and insert the bad bios or the bios with bad code on it. hit the button to flash the chip. IF your luckly and didnt fry any thing the CHIP should be reprogramed. REBOOT and find out. IF all goes well you'v just reflashed the bios IF all goes BAD well you'v just got to try it again. You may have not seated the chip correctly.

This topic has been coverd in the past.

01-05-2001 17:49:25

New MessageRE:flashing bios, hot or not? (modified 0 times) cheaphack
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Ah, well.... it was a thought. I ended up hot flashing the bios. This is what I did...
1)copy awflash.exe into a directory (i used c:/flash on my win98 disk). My version was v7.51 , and I last used it to flash a BIOS on a Soyo motherboard, so I probably got it from them.
2) Grab the Badflash BIOS image from a Badflash'ed chip. Just run "awflash /pn iopener.bin" . Its menu driven. all you have to do is hit return and it will save the old BIOS. I do this before messing with the chip because its a pain in the a$$ to look at the face-down lcd screen with the back off.
3) power down and unplug
4) CAREFULLY pry up the V5 Badflash BIOS. Make sure to antistatic-band yourself or touch the metal rim casing while you work
5) Take a length of fishing line, string it between the two "open" ends of the socket, and place the Badflash BIOS back in the socket
6) Boot the system to command line by hitting alt-F12 or ctrl-alt-F12 (not sure which), and choosing 5 (in Win98) to boot to command line

7) When you get to the C prompt, cd to the flash directory and get ready...
8) take both ends of the fishing line in one hand and hold down the board with a non-conductor, and pull the bios out. it will fly if not careful!
9) place unflashed or BIOS to reflash back in the socket.
10 run awflash. It will prompt you for BIOS file name, and you give it the iopener.bin that you saved at step 2.
11) follow prompts and complete the flash.
12) Reboot to make sure it took. (it did!).


Its worth it (and necessary, IMHO) to just go ahead and buy a BIOS, but the fishing line trick (kind of derived from a previous post) is what really does the trick. I could not manage to thread it in with a BIOS chip already present, so I "pre-strung" it to pull when ready. it saved me $10+shipping... money better spent on other mods!!

01-06-2001 16:33:50

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