[PLUG] more hardware trouble

[Galen Seitz]

Russell Senior <seniorr at aracnet.com> wrote:

> An oldish ASUS P2L97-DS motherboard, for dual-processor slot-1
> pentium-II's is giving me trouble flashing the most recent BIOS I can
> find.  ASUS's website says it is version 1008 from 02/12/1999.  There
> is also an older version 1005 available.  The AFLASH.EXE utility they
> provide to flash the BIOS gives me a "data compare failure" when
> trying to flash either one of these (BB instead of FF at byte 1, or
> vice versa).  Luckily, following the directions, I saved the
> originally installed BIOS and can reflash it successfully.  So, I am
> stuck on version 0106.

It's possible that the part isn't being erased.  When a flash device is
erased, the contents are set to FF.  If it is reading BB instead of FF,
I think the old bios didn't get erased.

> 
> There doesn't seem to be a jumper to enable BIOS changes.  I read
> somewhere random online that this kind of failure might indicate the
> BIOS chip is failing, the suggestion being to use a stand-alone BIOS
> programmer on a different BIOS chip.  The AFLASH program tells me the
> chip is an ATMEL AT29C020A (or is that AT29C0Z0A?  I can't read my own
> writing!).  The motherboard manual tells me it is a "Programmable
> 2Mbit Flash ROM".  So, heh-heh, anyone got one of these BIOS
> programmers?

A quick google search shows people using the asus pflash2 utility to flash
the bios.  Of course, this may have been superseded by aflash.  To
answer your question, yes, I have access to a programmer which should
handle that device.

galen