"Richard B. Johnson" wrote:
>
> Other provisions, both front-door and back-door are often provided to
> upgrade these BIOS. A bad BIOS on a motherboard, although often treated
> as a major event by a vendor (where they tell you the board is trashed
> and you need a new one), becomes a minor event when it is sent
> to the distributor or manufacturer. They just flash a new BIOS with
> a 'Raven' connected between a working PC's printer port and the JTAG port
> on the board. In the case of a motherboard, it just has to be powered
> up with the 'reset' clear. No existing BIOS need be functional.
Great, if you have the right tools.
The vendors all told me it would not be fixed by warranty.
The manufacturers all told me they don't deal
with end users and to talk to the vendor.
Not being a vendor myself, I have no contacts with distributors,
but the vendors I've used to get OEM stuff never want to
deal with the distributor either. They replace the parts with
the closest match they have and trash the bad part.
They claim it's cheaper for them than using the distributors
or manufacturers.
My last few boards had socketed flash chips,
so thaey could be reprogrammed out of the board.
I looked at trying a different (but identical config)
board's BIOS, and was going to use a seperate programmer
as a backup in case of a no-go. The software upgrade
I needed for my programmer was more than a 3rd party
BIOS chip so I didn't ever try it. So my new Athlon
Model 4 (aka Thunderbird) sits un used while I wait
for a new bopard that'll work with it.
-Thomas
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Mon Jul 31 2000 - 21:00:22 EST