Looking for bios chip

uch

I'm looking for an award 4.51pg bios chip for a Biostar motherboard in a Fujitsu T-Bird, anybody got any ideas where I might find one ?

yankinlk

http://www.wimsbios.com/

best bet is to boot a motherboard with a working removable bios, then (while running) remove bios chip and insert a blank one or one that you find from an other non-working board. then just flash it.

uch

I'm not quite sure how to flash the bios while the PC is running, I thought you had to boot to flash program to flash bios ?

yankinlk

yeah, you do. put in a floppy with the bios on it and a generic bios flashing program...you can get all that at the link i posted above.

then after you turn on the pc with the working bios (in the 2nd working motherboard) you remove that bios and replace it with one that is either blank, or of no use to you...then flash it. all while the pc is still running and booted to the flash disk.

Tom Dunne

Originally posted by yankinlk
you remove that bios and replace it with one that is either blank, or of no use to you...then flash it. all while the pc is still running and booted to the flash disk.

I don't think it is advisable to remove a chip from the PC when it is running. It can be dangerous for the chip (electrically, not logically).

As far as I remember, you boot the floppy and flash the chip that is in the motherboard. If you want to flash a different chip, you power down the PC, replace the chip, boot up and flash it.

TD.

PPC

Winflash lets you flash the bios in windows.
I've done a pile of them and it works everytime

yankinlk

Originally posted by tom dunne
I don't think it is advisable to remove a chip from the PC when it is running. It can be dangerous for the chip (electrically, not logically).
As far as I remember, you boot the floppy and flash the chip that is in the motherboard. If you want to flash a different chip, you power down the PC, replace the chip, boot up and flash it.

TD.

is it not advisable by you becasue you KNOW its not possible...or hypothetical? I have done it, and it worked for me on advice from someone else. How are you going to boot a motherboard with a non working bios pray tell m8? as in my case...my motherboards bios was corrupted hence i had to either a. buy a new bios for the motherboard (expensive/impossible at the time) or b. do what i did.

Matt Simis

I did it in work with 3 motherboards, no problems. Obviously its not advisable, but was the only option.




Matt

Gerry

If the bios chip on your machine is completely screwed, goto www.badflash.com , with your motherboard make and model and they will ship you a new bios chip with the bios of your choice on it. I've used them twice, and it only costs about 20 euro per chip. First time I used badflash.com was after forcing the wrong bios on, next time was trusting a windows bios program which was obviously an alpha version, and should not have been on the motherboard cd.


The method with 2 identical motherboards sounds extremely dodgy, but isn't as bad as it sounds. After the pc boots, the bios rom is copied to ram, so when you take the chip out it isn't actually being accessed, and so the method works. I have done this once, and it worked, with 2 old pentium motherboards, which were similar insofar as they both had the i430vx chipset. But more than likely you will not have 2 identical boards available.

elmer

i've done the booting swapping thing - i did it by first loosening the bios chip so that it was easily removed once booted - it does sound very dodgy but worked a treat

the bios util i used - i forget the name of it let me force the image on to the chip becuase the board was a different one

rob1891

I am guessing that if my bios chip is soldered onto the motherboard then there is no way to recover?

I wasted the bios on old pentium 75mhz by letting windows2000 do a scandisk on my bootfloppy and fix/corrupt the flash image :mad:

rob