No more BIOS Saver... Hummm. This I may be able to help with. What packages do we want/need? PLCC32 and DIP32? Does that cover 95% of motherboards?
I found dental floss works well for pulling the chip. Take two peaces and wrap them around the chip one vertically and one horizontally, tie all four ends together and you have a nice way to pull the chip again and again.....
Different size chips. I have a VIA epia-mII that i have been trying to get linuxbios installed on. I am using both the sst 39sf020 (256k) and the sst 39sf040 (512k). The board see's both and is able to boot from both. I did find out that the "stock" bios image will only boot off the 256, when i flash the stock 256k image onto the 512k chip it will not boot. No clue as to why. This could be a function of my programmer, not sure.
-Adam Jeff Carr wrote:
According to the manufacturer, they are out of the BIOS Saver's and do not plan on manufacturing more. I tried to inquire about what quantity was needed to get them to make more, but didn't hear back from them. This is disappointing. Either the PLCC package was designed to protect the motherboard socket, or it was designed to discourage people from doing bios work. It's horrible. Every time you remove the chip it bends the pins around. It's only a matter of time until the pins break off. Despite being careful with a small screwdriver and even using a PLCC chip puller. Fry's only has one and it's not well designed. I don't fish so I don't have fishing string for that other seemingly troublesome trick. It would be helpful if there was a chip socket that could be pulled straight up with one's fingers. Perhaps there are enough engineers and interest that we could cleverly design such a device (or something else ingenious) and have a bunch of them made? Along the same lines, has anyone tried using different size SST chips? I tried to duplicate the 256KB bios by putting it in a 512KB chip (SST 28SF040A vs 39SF020A). This didn't seem to work (no beep or video but didn't try port 80 parallel card yet). Perhaps someone knows if this should work. Can someone recommend a good place to get a handful of SST 39SF02A PLCC chips for these experiments? Thanks, Jeff
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