"David Travers" said:
I have two motherboards, cheap A7V600-x, of which one has a corrupt BIOS
during a BIOS upgrade.
I have tried to do a hotflash method by removing the BIOS chip and putting
in the working motherboard.
The board boots up and then I swap the BIOS chip.
However when running the upgrade I get " Flash Protection is switch on" from
aflash.exe.
How do I get around this?
Is this the flash chip ? The motherboard pictures are never clear
enough to be absolutely sure.
http://www.pmcflash.com/resource_center/docs/Pm49FL002-004 V1.4.pdf
The chip samples the "IC" pin at power up, to determine what mode
it is in. Check with a voltmeter, to see whether that pin is
normally high or low, as I don't know what mode the 8237 Southbridge
will be running that chip. Once you know what mode it is being
run in, restrict your reading of the datasheet to the appropriate
sections.
Have a look through the datasheet. There are several mechanisms for
write protecting portions or the whole flash chip. In a project
I worked on, we had sporadic "locked segment" problems, because
we weren't flashing a chip properly, and if a software program
randomly tramples over the address space of a device like this,
all manner of bizarre things can result.
To play with a device like this, without damaging the underlying
motherboard, I would really want a schematic, to understand
what I can and cannot do to the device pins. For example, there
are WP# and TBL# pins for protecting the flash. They could be
driven by GPIO pins, and forcing them to the state I want, might
damage the driving circuit. The worst case would be, if Asus has
hard wired those pins to a power rail, in which case changing
their state with a shorting wire or the like, might burn motherboard
tracks and destroy something. So, while there are things you
could experiment with (like temporarily grounding INIT# pin, to
get the chip to reinitialize itself - sort of a sanity check
after being hot inserted into the socket), I cannot recommend you
try things like this due to the risk of damaging something.
There are a couple of alternatives. Depending on when this project
must be completed, and how much money you have to spend on it,
you could try buying a blank chip from somewhere (I'm having
trouble finding an exact replacement). You could buy a blank,
then see if the chip still claims to be locked. Otherwise, if
time is critical, then badflash.com will sell you a programmed
chip for about $25, which will eliminate much wasted time and
frustration. Since you have two motherboards, a BIOS Savior
is another alternative (about $25, ioss.com.tw) - even if the
BIOS Savior cannot program your old chip, the BIOS chip it comes
with can be used in its place.
If you get a BIOS Savior, insert it in the good board, installing
the good board's BIOS chip in the BIOS Savior's socket. Boot up,
then flash the BIOS Savior's own chip. Shut down, unload the
good chip, install the duff chip. Flip the switch on the BIOS
Savior, to boot with the BIOS Savior's own chip. Attempt to flash
the duff chip. If it doesn't work, just transfer the BIOS Savior
to the bad board, and use it without any device in the BIOS
Savior's socket. In other words, if the duff chip won't program,
then maybe you can get by with the flash chip permanently soldered
to the BIOS Savior.
Paul
