BIOS Chip Programmer

[Hassan]

Ok

I know a few people who have killed their motherboard because of the bios update failure.

Well we all know that the bios is in the small little PLCC chip on the motherboard, but have we all considered pulling that chip out and re-programming with them small little programmers out in the market.

Have a look here

Well I know that some people here @ c3d: know this, but I was bored and decided to research this further.

They are kinda expensive, but we all should have this I think considering the BIOS is the most annoying thing to update.

The whole point of this thread was just to let y'all know about this.

 

[Zoot]

Most of those chips are soldered to the motherboard these days so replacing them would be impossible and even if you could and you wanted to program it yourself you'd have to find out the how to map the electrical connections of EEPROM chip using a programming language such as ABEL with one of those programmers. It would be a lot more trouble than it's worth IMO.

I've bricked a laptop in the past with a BIOS update failure but luckily I got the motherboard replaced under warranty.

I've also had to use the BIOS recovery feature twice on my 4 year old home build: (AMD Sempron 2600+, Asus K8V-MX, 512MB DDR, XFX 6200 AGP, XP and Ubuntu)

Apparently the EZ flash utility was somewhat buggy in the first few BIOSes released for that board or so I was lead to believe. Floppies are also pretty prone to error. Flashing off a USB key is much more efficient (CRC is a Godsend! )

All I can say is thank God for BIOS recovery features.

Anyway what I'm basically saying is that the BIOS should always fall into the "If it ain't broke don't fix it" class.

 

[Pyr0]

with an SPI flasher/programmer and using the SPI headers included on many new mobos, there's no need to remove any bios chips, you just flash em in place

i still have an old p5k3 dlx board i need to send off for reflashing, just haven't got round to it...