Switching BIOS Chips to revive dead board.

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kiajoon

Limp Gawd
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Jun 6, 2005
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I have a physically dead P5B-Deluxe board (black PCB) and has been offered a P5B-E (Yellow PCB) which is dead from a failed BIOS flash. I am thinking of scavenging the BIOS chip over to the P5B-E board which is still physically functionable.

Can I transfer the BIOs chip physically? Will it work since both boards are using the same chipset?
 
Yup, Asus has been using soldered BIOS chips recently - I guess that their bean counters decided that the cost savings over all their boards outweighed the costs of having to RMA whole boards when BIOS flashes go wrong rather than just replacing chips.
 
SMT actually speeds up production, one less thing to stuff on the board, one less through hole part...

If you've ever seen how PCB's are produced you'll understand ;)
 
If they can SMT a 775 pin cpu socket they can SMT a bios chip socket as well. Abit manages to do it.
 
Yeah, soldering the bios chip just sucks. i remember when you could pop the chip out, put it in another board, flash it, then yer all good.

i recently just had to RMA a board because of a bios corruption. They sent me a new board but with a freakin older bios..... But at least I got it back. Would of been easier to just send a little chip or put it in another board...
 
They might also have their crashfree bios in mind. If you preserve the boot block, then you can recover from a bad flash
 
MD_Willington said:
SMT actually speeds up production, one less thing to stuff on the board, one less through hole part...

If you've ever seen how PCB's are produced you'll understand ;)
Click to expand...
Oh, I understand very well - as I said it's all cost driven.
However, replacing $120 mobos instead of $6 BIOS chips (all $ figures notional & don't incl. carr. costs ;)) especially at a time when their Windows BIOS flash utility seems to be increasing the rate of bad BIOS flashes ...
& it's certainly less convenient for the customer.
 
pallesen said:
They might also have their crashfree bios in mind. If you preserve the boot block, then you can recover from a bad flash
Click to expand...

Can you explain more? Is that not from Gigabyte? I never knew that Asus has dual BIOS, but they have BIOS options you can save for your overclocking settings. .
 
pallesen said:
If you preserve the boot block, then you can recover from a bad flash
Click to expand...
isn't that true on all mobos?
certainly on abits if the bootblock is intact you have a very high chance of recovery.
 
kiajoon said:
Can you explain more? Is that not from Gigabyte? I never knew that Asus has dual BIOS, but they have BIOS options you can save for your overclocking settings. .
Click to expand...

It's not a dual-bios solution. It only has a single chip. And the recovery section of the bios seems not to be hardware-protected, so it's not fool-proof (like the dual-bios solution is).

BUFF said:
isn't that true on all mobos?
Click to expand...

I guess it's true, as long as the bios supports it. The latest crashfree v3 can even read a new bios image from an usb stick
 
kiajoon said:
OK guys can anyone give me information of how to recover it?
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read the manual, there's usually instructions to recover from a bad flash,most likely have a floppy or a cd with the bios file on it. most of the time it has to be renamed to a spific name, such as AN832.bin
 
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