Raffaele BELARDI posted on Thu, 03 Dec 2009 10:21:56 +0100 as excerpted: > Same here, I had to order a new flash chip when it happened to me. The > recovery procedure you mention is specific to your motherboard model?
No. It's specific to brands of BIOS. Both AMI BIOS (mine) and Award BIOS have a recovery procedure, tho the other one (IDR the name) and vendors such as Dell may not. http://biosman.com/biosrecovery.html When it first happened, when I'd try to boot it would do a floppy drive seek, apparently trying to find that AMIBOOT.ROM file as detailed in the above. But as I didn't know what I was doing, I used the EPROM-clear pins on the mobo, thinking I had nothing to lose anyway and hoping to clear the problem, and lost that. By the time I started looking for BIOS replacement sites (which I had read about before so I knew they existed) and came across that info, it wasn't doing a floppy seek either, so ordering a new chip was pretty much my only option. This board is EOLed, so no more flashes for it, but I'm going to know what my BIOS is and have a recovery floppy ready the next time I DO do a flash. (That's assuming BIOS hasn't been replaced by EFI or something by then, I think they have their own recovery procedures... FWIW, I just used the gdisk ebuild available in bugzilla, to build gdisk, and used it to switch all my disks over to to GPT partitions. I'm ready for > 2TiB disks now, AND have the extra reliability of checksummed partition tables as well as no worries about extended partitions, any more. Plus GPT (and gdisk) allows naming the partitions, which helps quite a bit in managing them. GPT was designed for EFI, but works quite well with standard BIOS as well, as long as you follow the rules. Gentoo's grub 0.97-rWHATEVER has patches that support it, and it's a kernel option, so I was good to go as soon as I enabled that and rebuilt/reinstalled my kernel, and merged gdisk using the bugzilla ebuild. =:^) FWIW, routers and the like, and various firmware based media players, etc, often have similar recovery procedures. I was familiar with them, but wasn't aware they had recovery procedures in general computer BIOS as well. -- Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs. "Every nonfree program has a lord, a master -- and if you use the program, he is your master." Richard Stallman
