Archived from groups: alt.comp.periphs.mainboard.asus (
More info?)
nospam@needed.com (Paul) wrote:
>In article <116orqbicnlhn32@news.supernews.com>, billiebobt <> wrote:
>
>> Anybody know where to find these, looked all over the Asus site
>> without success. Thanks for ant help
>
>When HP uses a board, the version is custom made for HP.
>
>In some cases, when Asus makes one of these OEM boards, they
>make a virtually identical version for retail as well. Those
>are the cases where messing around would be the most productive.
>
>Looking through the current Asus list of products, I don't see
>anything that matches the picture here. Your board is a microATX
>PCI-Express video board, but with no PCI-E x1 slots, only the
>x16 for the video card:
>
>http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/genericDocument?lc=en&cc=us&docname=c00297771
>
>Let us say you grab the BIOS for a 915 board that uses DDR
>memory. You somehow manage to bypass the flasher check for
>the Asus product string. You flash in the Asus BIOS.
>
>If you were to do that, you might find some of the onboard
>peripherals (LAN, firewire) might stop working (as the new
>BIOS doesn't know how to enumerate them). If the motherboards
>differ in the definition of any special purpose GPIO signals
>(which are used to turn stuff on and off), there is no way
>of knowing what will happen.
>
>At the very least, if you want to turn your motherboard into
>a guinea pig, buy a BIOS Savior from ioss.com.tw (about $25),
>as that device gives you dual BIOS chips. You can then do
>as many experiments as you wish using one BIOS chip, and if
>any of the experiments fails, you simply flip the switch on
>the BIOS Savior, and run the original HP BIOS again.
>
>Yes, people have done the kind of brain surgery you are
>proposing before, but it helps a lot if the motherboards
>bear some resemblance to one another, from an architecture
>and implementation standpoint. Flashing the BIOS is not
>an insurmountable problem, but will be a challenge
>nonetheless.
>
>(For example, you could purchase a preprogrammed BIOS chip
>from badflash.com, but what BIOS image do you use to do the
>job ? If you are going to try this route, you will also need
>to make sure the size of the BIOS chip on the HP board is the
>same as the size of the BIOS image coming from the Asus board.
>An OEM board is likely to use a smaller flash chip than a
>regular Asus board, because that reduces the manufacturing cost
>by a bit, which makes the brain surgery yet more complicated.
>With LPC flash chips, this is probably not a big deal, and
>just requires that the flash chips used are big enough to
>hold either an Asus or an HP image.)
>
>If you want to see a datasheet for a flash chip, look at
>page 16 of this document. This product comes in several
>sizes, but this datasheet only shows two of them and how
>they differ in operation:
>
>http://www.pmcflash.com/resource_center/docs/Pm49FL002%2D004%20V1%2E4%2Epdf
>(from http://www.pmcflash.com/products/fwh.cfm)
>
>HTH,
> Paul
Thanks Paul
I appreciate the lengths you went to in your reply and maybe I need to rethink.
Much obliged.
Billie
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