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(That's assuming BIOS hasn't been replaced by EFI or something by then, I |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