Overiding motherboard identification/Checksum IDs

Particleman · Sat Nov 23, 2002 11:19 am

I recently experienced a bad flash on my Asus A7N266-E. I bought a Asus A7N8X to replace it but I would still like to get my old board working again. What I want to do is a hot flash with my new board. My problem is when I use the award bios flasher after swapping chips, it says there is a checksum error, unable to flash, and it doesn't flash (not surprising since the bios doesn't match the motherboard I am programming it on). Is there any way to overide this? I've tried using uniflash, it detects the SST bios chip properly but not the chipset (not surprising since the nForce 2 is very new) it will let me attempt to flash and I can see the progress bars fill but when it tries to verify, it always says that it failed to verify, (it gives me a Y/N option to retry but retrying doesn't help) and again I am unable to complete my flash.

Does anyone have any suggestions?

Sat Nov 23, 2002 12:37 pm

Please run UniFlash with -log parameter ("uniflash.exe -log") and send me the uniflash.log file it will create.
There's no support for nVidia chipsets because I have not datasheets - but if Flash ROM chip detected properly, it means that it works! Looks like the south bridge is compatible with some other one (VIA?). Looks like there's a bug in support for some SST chips - that's why I need the log file.

Sat Nov 23, 2002 8:42 pm

Have you tried the Asus DOS Flashprog Aflash ?
It should be working flashing an Asus Bios not belonging to the Board used .
t should work - I use an old Asus P2B and have flashed with Aflash many different Asus Bios on this Board from Socket-5 up to Socket-A Bios .

Particleman · Sat Nov 23, 2002 10:28 pm

Here is the log generated by uniflash
04:18:56.00: UniFlash v1.28 started: A:\UNIFLASH.EXE -log
04:18:56.55: Chipset detected: (10DE,01E0,A2) + (10DE,0060,A3)
04:18:57.15: Flat Real Mode initialized
04:18:57.76: CMOS size detected: 128b
04:18:58.36: System ROM selected
04:18:59.02: Flash ROM chip detected: SST 49LF020/3V
04:18:59.57: Flash ROM ID: BF61,FFFF
04:19:00.28: UniFlash running in interactive mode
04:19:22.09: Flashing BIOS including BootBlock
04:19:36.10: Flashing 262144b long BIOS image to 0
04:19:47.80: Flashing failed
04:19:55.98: Exiting UniFlash...
04:19:56.42: Turning off logging, shutting down to real mode

As for Aflash, Aflash doesn't seem to support the A7N8X yet, awardflash was included on the CD. And when I try to use aflash it just gives me an unable to find bios hook message. Aflash was the program I used to update my bios on my orignal nForce (the A7N266-E) though.

Sun Nov 24, 2002 12:11 am

Have you tried latest Aflash 2.18 ?
ftp://ftp.asuscom.de/pub/ASUSCOM/BIOS/B ... ash218.zip

Particleman · Sun Nov 24, 2002 1:43 am

Yep that was the one I used.

Sun Nov 24, 2002 1:46 pm

Support for SST 49LF020 chip looks OK.
When you get the verification error - how does the memory map look like? I mean something like "XXXX....." - the X means verification error, solid block (I replaced them here with a .) means OK.
Maybe the WP signal to the chip is active preventing all writes and must be deactivated by programming the chipset registers (which requires datasheet...)

Particleman · Thu Dec 19, 2002 12:23 pm

hmmm... I don't know what happened to the last couple of messages in this thread, they seemed to have vanished. Anyways as I mentioned in the messages which disappeared, I gave up on trying to hotswap the bios chip on my A7N8X and instead turned my attention to hotswapping on my MSI 845E MAX P4 motherboard. This was also unsuccessful using both the AMI flasher and uniflash, I figured that it had something to do with the hotswap. Then I noticed that my bios on my 845E did not match my motherboard. Apparently a few months ago I accidently flashed my MSI 845E MAX, with the bios for the MSI 845E MAX2, although everything still works on this motherboard, one thing doesn't. The "enable bios flash protection" setting in the bios seems to have no effect, since when I try just regularly flashing (not hotswapping) the bios with the AMI flasher on this board now, it gives me a flash erasing error. I think if I can get my MSI flashed back to the proper bios I can hotswap my broken A7N266E bios. But the problem is, how can I properly reflash my MSI 845E MAX bios, if the bios write protection setting doesn't seem to be working. Is there anyway to disable the write protection on the Intel i845E chipset other than using the bios on a jumperless motherboard?