Spi flashrom programmer1/2/2023 ![]() PS/2 was broken anyway, but USB keyboard and mice worked fine in the UEFI setup. This revealed another major issue with the swapped BIOSes, though: Using Rufus on Windows, the same flash drive booted immediately. FreeDOSįirst idea: Get the computer running with FreeDOS from a USB flash drive, hot-swap the SPI flash chip and flash a clean BIOS image.Ĭreating a bootable USB drive on Linux with Unetbootin failed, the resulting USB flash drive wouldn't boot at all. ![]() Mainboard temperature was reported as +155☌īut the computer booted and actually started Linux perfectly well. Here's a rare sight: ASUS mainboard showing an ASRock UEFI setup.Īs expected, this didn't behave properly (of course): With the computer not POST'ing, another solution was required.īoth computers used (socketed!) DIP-8 SPI flash chips to store their BIOS images.ĪSUS H81M-PLUS used a Winbond 25Q64 (8MiB), while the ASRock H81-VG4 used a Winbond 25Q32 (4MiB).Īmazingly, the BIOS images were actually similar enough to work in the wrong machine! Getting one would've involved a 2h car trip. ![]() At the time of writing, the big chip shortage is happening and Raspberry Pi's are totally unavailable. Only problem: We had no Raspberry Pi available. Flash to the chip (make a backup first!), you're golden. cap file, which ASUS provides, to get a nice 8MB flash image. Strip away the first 0x800 bytes from the. (or a CH341-based programmer)Īny Raspberry Pi (even Zero, 1, etc.) will work fine. The small ITX board had no advanced BIOS flashback features and only supported in-UEFI ("EZ Flash") or MS-DOS updates. Without another (older) Haswell CPU there was no way to get the mainboard to POST and update the BIOS. Still, nothing.Ī look into the ASUS H81M's manual revealed the real issue, the BIOS version was probably too old for the CPU. Troubleshooting ensued, the system was stripped to the minimum, power cables checked, RAM re-seated, CPU re-seated. No POST, no beep codes, absolutely nothing. The unused board used the exact same chipset, had the same form-factor and feature set, except for more video outputs.Īfter swapping the boards (and re-applying fresh thermal compound), we got. I had an unused ASUS H81M-PLUS in my spare parts bin, collecting dust because it has been replaced by a full-size ATX board (with 4 DIMM slots, 6 SATA ports, etc.). ![]() The old mainboard only had a single VGA output (and a slightly odd behaving BIOS), so was forced to use a Nvidia GPU (under Linux, with noveau), which isn't ideal at all. We wanted to replace desktop PC mainboard (ASRock H81M-VG4) with a different one. This project started (as so often happens) with a simple, 30min task. ![]()
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