~Toughbooktalk~

I need a complete BIOS backup for a CF52 mk1 ATI//WUXGA version.
This should be CF52A or CF52B. I prefer an A version.

I am experimenting with my programmer.

Tell me what program you want me to use. I still have my Mk1 ATI, it has Linux on it but it won't be but a hard drive swap away to make it windows.

It is a Phoenix BIOS.

I am going to use a hardware eeprom programmer to load it on mine.

Apparently many of the software backup utils do not actually copy the entire contents of the chip.

I "think" this is what we want. I am guessing as I don't really know what I am doing.

Intel's Flash Programming Tool.

Info from this thread http://donovan6000.blogspot.com/2013/08 ... tings.html

Scroll down to where it shows the different versions for the different hardware
http://www.win-raid.com/t596f39-Intel-M ... Tools.html

THIS looks very promising. It says it copies the entire BIOS chip. That's what I need.
https://www.flashrom.org/Flashrom

Maybe one more hint: there's an MSDOS port of the Flashrom utility:

http://ra.openbios.org/~idwer/flashrom/dos/You can use it to get an image of the whole flash chip (= read the chip) in this way:

flashrom.exe -p internal -r image.bin

I think that msdos link above is wonky.

This does show a Linux version.
https://www.flashrom.org/Downloads

Instructions for DOS usage of flashrom from the wiki.

Howto use flashrom with FreeDOS instead of Linux (because of half broken bios or any other reasons):

Get a USB memory drive with at least 1GB of memory available (or any other memory device you can boot from)
Download FreeDOS Image form http://downloads.joelinoff.com/fdos11.tar.bz2 (more information here: http://joelinoff.com/blog/?p=431 )
Extract the image
Use dd to put the image on your prefered memory device (example: dd if=/extracted/image/fdos11.img of=/dev/sdX bs=4M)
After it have been written to the usb device, remove it once and put it back again into your computer
Download latest precompiled flashrom from here: http://buildbot.flashrom.org/buildresul ... ashrom.exe
Copy latest precompiled flashrom dos exe to the main directory of the usb device
Download CWSDPMI.EXE from http://www.flashrom.org/File:Csdpmi7b.zip and extract it
copy bin/CWSDPMI.EXE to your usb device
Download your bios file you would like to flash and copy it to the main directory of the usb device
Unmount the USB drive and you can now boot from it and use flashrom as described here:
http://linux.die.net/man/8/flashrom
http://flashrom.org/Board_Testing_HOWTO

Well I tried flashrom.exe in DOS and it could not read the BIOS chip.
Very odd since the chip is listed in the flashrom list.
Flashrom comes with FreeDOS and I used a Microsoft version 8 that I had. Maybe that's the issue?
Flashrom was originally designed for Linux so I may have to boot a Linux drive and go through the hoops.

I must be doing something wrong, but I don't know what just yet.

Jeff may try flashrom on a CF31. Stay tuned.

This is related.

I managed to flash a CF52GUN BIOS chip with a software backup ROM file using my programmer. This is the first time I have had any success doing that.

The file was one Springfield sent me quite a while ago. 4,096kb in size. I think he used universal bios backup toolkit. I need to find out for sure. The rom file was named CF52GUN-Mk2-AmericanMegatrendsInc.-V2.66L14.rom It is a Win7 BIOS so I will check that next.

Not sure what I did different. I am posting a screen grab of the programmer log.
One thing I know I did was pull ALL drives before rebooting. Clicking the write config button was new also. I can't get to the CMOS battery so I could not reset it. The BIOS hours stayed the same. The model number changed though. I do have another BIOS chip that is flashed with the original BIOS so later on I will compare them more closely.

The hard drive does not have an OS on it.

If one of you guys thinks this should be in a different location on TBT, go ahead and move the thread.