So the lastest, of what has become the, why can't i flash this drive? ,issue.
I downloaded the tool that is on UBCD, BIOS, and put that on the flash drive, ran the tests, identified the bios, and it all checked out, plus I had the name of the bios manufacterer..AMI 0100.
So I went to AMIs website, and downloaded there identification tool, which point out the board manu facturer, and ran it on this PC. It identified that it was a dell board and bios, which was correct.
So then I ran it on the Emachine/intel machine, and it did the same thing, except it says it is an intel bios...it told me the board correctly and gave me the bios name and date also. It wasn't supposed to run in dos, but it did the same thing on this pc, which is XP
Now I am going to search the bios sites, and educate myself on this as much as I can. Emachines charges $19.99 for 15 mins of advice, but I am afraid they will probably tell me to get a new PC, lol. The site that handles dells bios issues, is biosagent plus. They sent me a bios update and it is the same one as the EXE one I downloaded and ran from Intel, and froze the machine. (The same files and procedures under a different name EXE, nice looking Icon though..)
When I asked them for support, all they could do was send me an exe, and thats it, some support. Thier answer was,"we don't do custom bios work anymore" I read between the lines, and it meant, "They payed the company to run an activeX prog on your PC, and fired all the techs who know what to do, now we are a database pointer" Of course the program will not run under dos anyway, but I did try with the bootstick formatted with dos.
So for you hardware people who are following this, the bios chip is wave soldered in, and even though my soldering skills are awesome, there is slim chance I would be able to replace it if it were bad, and all the tests say it isn't, at least the ones from the bios program,(BTW, I ran the program with the stick formatted with MSDOS, that dang OPCODE error) The writing on the CHIP? SMSC in bold type..LPC47M172-NR..00444-A9562...8H119057A..American megatrends 1994. Pardon me while I search google with that info...
Found a data sheet and a article about motherboard glue, but it is not clear whether this is a term or it is glued onto the MB. The data sheet was interesting..I will look into this also..
I used the prog in BIOS to wipe out the data on the chip, but it was not like wiping an EEPROM, and it still came up with checksum error. It still only boots when the battery is unplugged from the board..and then it reports the checksum error, and asks to go into setup to set time...
See I know that there is a problem, probably the flash utility aggravated it, but I still haven't given up yet. To much checks out as the chip isn't burnt completly. Maybe the Bios forums will have an answer. Even if I was able to replace the chip, I would have a hard time finding one, and the datasheets list 1993. The search engines for chips turned up nada.
So the only hope is that I don't have the right bios file, utility, tool to correct this issue...yeah I have a new PC, which will smoke this one, but I am going to look into this further, as a side project..
Any comments on this saga, are welcome and appreciated..More when I have it
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