Summary: BIOS flashed etherboot will not start

[Heinrich Rebehn <rebehn@comm.uni-bremen.de>]

Hi,

After some days of struggle to flash etherboot into an ASUS P2B BIOS i
am moved to share my experiences with you:

- Obtained cbrom.exe from somewhere in the net (~1/2 day)
- Modified BIOS and flashed, did not work
- Checked Vendor/Device-ID, no avail
- Learned that some BIOSes are not modifiable at all (compilation
switch)
- Tried BIOS for other MB (P2B {-S, -N, ...}, only 98 of 128 installed
MB RAM recognized, but no network boot
- Obtained BIOS from someone on the list. First BIOS that appeared to
have OEM suport. Included 3c905-driver as /OEM0, flashed, powered down
the PC, and switched it back on. The ATX power supply immediately turned
off again. Tried 10 times, always the same: power supply stays on for
max 1/2 second.
So i unplugged the BIOS chip, and power stayed on! I then tried to hot
plug it in again in attempt to boot the PC and power turned off again.
Trying to program the chip with a PROM Programmer the next day did not
work,
apparently it was damaged when i tried to plu it in hot.
I am now waiting for a delivery of replacement EEPROMS. The PC hasn't
been usable for some days now.

Anyway, thanks to all who tried to help!

Maybe we should put a word of warning into the README. Especially the
paragraph:

"Newer mainboards that have an AWARD-BIOS can use etherboot without
     seperate EPROMS and therefore without the necessity of having a
     EPROM-programmer[?]."

is somewhat misleading.
Flashing the BIOS is always a (small) risk. Flashing with unsupported,
hacked BIOS-Image is _dangerous_ and may render your PC unbootable.
If you don't have access to a prom-burner you should stay away from
experimenting.


Now for the fun part: Today i received a new computer with a 3c905c NIC
with EEPROM. I used cromutil to program etherboot 4.5.7 into it and it
worked at once!
I think this is the better way to go than trying to patch the BIOS.

Have fun,

Heinrich Rebehn
                        "Have disk - will travel"
University of Bremen
Physics / Electrical and Electronics Engineering
- Department of Telecommunications -

E-mail: mailto:rebehn@comm.uni-bremen.de
Phone : +49/421/218-4664
Fax   :            -3341
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