BIOS Eprom

Well from what you describe, your flashing power led is showing it is actually working:

Maybe you should just give it it's time to finish? I am actually sorry to say, but I guess you do just something wrong. You would be better of to send it for repair than instead of trying to flash anything.

Again please note that THIS NOTEBOOK HAS NO BIOS IN COMMON SENSE YOU CAN SOLDER OUT as it does not exist. I already written that, InsydeH20 is no Bios like you know them, it's a EFI module emulating BIOS.

There is hardly something you can do wrongly, if you read the manual correctly. I even killed my own "BIOS" to test if it works and it did, what else you want? There is no other way you can fix that. If you read the manuals and what I wrote on the process here before, that must be enough to get it working unless you killed something else.

 

Sam, please stop posting non-sense until you learn more about what you are talking about. The BIOS chip has been listed and is correct. This chip can be removed, erased and programmed. It is also possible to kill the program on the chip causing complete failure of the boot process. You might want to read up a bit on EFI

 

Argh, you really want to solder this out? Go on, but it's really useless.
Anyhow, I am fairly familiar with EFI, thanks. Other than that I am as well familiar with the inside of flashit.exe/winflash used to update it and InsydeH20.
Please show me how you kill it entirely, I would even try it.

Other than that, it's not a BIOS chip x) BIOS <-> EFI is diffrent, InsydeH20 still is no BIOS in common sense (with bootblock etc.), sure you can reprogram a flash but seriously, what you want to flash there? Simply write the FD data on it and hope it works?

 

Do you have any evidence to prove that AAO's "bios" is infact EFI? InsydeH2O also makes regular "bios" as well.

On the service manual, it says AAO has a Winbond 8Mb bios chip. Nowhere on the service manual says AAO has an EFI.

 

Sam has no idea what he is talking about and really is making little to no sense at all. And I personally do not know the AA1's do use EFI or not but I have not found any documentation saying that they do use EFI. I know that InSyde does do some EFI but chances are that our AA1's boot using BIOS not EFI.

Regardless, if there is a chip that an be flashed, it can be flashed. If that chip being flashed is written with a bad file or the computer is unplugged while flashing it can render the AA1 useless unless you flash the chip externally. It would be like cutting the power cord to a computer and then trying to fix windows by starting up the computer. Guess what, it won't work . It is an odd metaphor but I think it explains it pretty well . I have fixed BIOS on bad motherboards for myself, friends and also ppl online. This was all done by removing the chip and flashing the proper information back onto it. I can check If the info on the chip is bad by verifying the checksum, and if it is wrong the computer has absolutely no idea how to boot up.

In fact I have a perfect example. I used to flash performance programs on car computers. I would remove the chip from the ECU, erase it and then reprogram it. I would confirm proper programming by comparison and also checksum. Sometimes the verification from chip to buffer would be correct but the checksum would be wrong and sometimes visa-versa. If that was the case, the car would not start. Once I even programmed a 512kb program onto a 1mb chip. The car would start but as soon as the guy put it into gear, the car would die. I forgot to verify the program both ways and when I checked it again I realized what I had done wrong. Oddly enough this was on a type of ECU that if the program was wrong it would lock out the ECU. Being as I had the checksum correct but it was written to every other sector, the car had no idea I screwed up BTW, if a programmer screws up a Porsche ECU they are out at leat $3,600 :shock:

 

We all know that AAO uses bios. Whether if this bios is the legacy bios or EFI bios is unknown. EFI "bios" is stored on a flash chip almost the same way as legacy bios do, so it's pretty hard to determine whether if its emulated bios or the real bios without knowning everything.

 

Yes Insyde makes legacy BIOS but InsydeH20 is a legacy emulating line.

http://www.insydesw.com/products/products-efi.htm
http://www.insydesw.com/products/products-efi-h2o.htm

The service Manual is not the holy bible man, sorry. It was made for a service man to fix things up.

Did you ever see a BIOS with PE headers? x) You can seee even EFI PEI refrenced in this screen.



I know pretty well what I am talking about, yes there is a Flash chip, but you not seem to know what is actually inside, I wanted to help you by telling you that, instead getting flamed. So Please do not flame me. I know what I am talking about pretty well.





Here you can see the EFI manifasting itself:



Bigger pics: http://www.flickr.com/photos/38175080@N03/

Yes I know about ECU of cars, but here, we used to do editing with ODB2 these days. Soldering is a bit oldschool (At least for the cars VAG, DC, BMW I know about).
You know about WinOLS etc.?

 

BTW... I wasnt the one who flamed you. I was just asking for some evidences.

 

Mabybe some just misunderstood me:

1.) there is no BIOS in common sence, there is EFI which runs a legacy BIOS driver on top of it.*
2.) EFI resists on a flash, thats correct, but from the nature of EFI, it contains a lot more than the actual BIOS driver binarys which are updated.
3.) Just reflashing the Chip with in whole with a copy of another one might lead to very unwelcomed results.
4.) If the ACER supplied update fails, there is actually a fallback (crisis mode) in case BIOS driver is broken or no existant which is to the current state of knowledge on this not possible to break from software (unless you force the flasher tool explictly to do the mega shit).

* Windows XP does not support EFI nativly, afaik only Vista SP2 has some kind of EFI (UEFI in this case) support.

 

You must be over in Europe. Over here (in the US) my POST screen shows "InSyde BIOS: V3309" and says absolutely nothing about EFI. Maybe you guys get some sort of Emulated BIOS or run EFI but we do not (from what I can tell). You would think with EFI being relatively new that it would brag about it at POST . I also noticed you have V1.0 something which is Euro and could possibly be EFI emulating BIOS.

I am not flaming you but you kind of contradict yourself saying that there is nothing you can do to flash EFI. You make it sound like it comes magically from M31 or something lol. My point being, if there is an update there is an update and there is a way to update something. If there is a way to update something, there is a way to screw it up . And it is all on a flashable chip.

As for OBDII, I know, I quit chip tuning in 2004 and got out just in time lol. If you are in Europe, go check out UPsolute. I helped to start UPsolute in the US and make it the #2 VW tuner in the US

 

Which model you got exactly? Yes that's right I am a bit far away from the us Try to remove all USB from the AAO, inlcuing the SD and boot up with ESC pressed, you might get the EFI show up as well. The screen I posted above is usally invisible. and hidden by the Splash image. The InsydeH20 is the product line having this. I not seen any AAO yet with a Insyde MobilePRO which is indeed a real Bios (but only for AMD and ICH6 chipset).

This PDF by InsydeSW is illustrating the scenario quite well:
http://www.insydesw.com/products/products-efi-h2o.pdf

 

I went into BIOS ( ) and disabled quick boot to get the POST info. I figured I would try your way with ESC and got the same screen saying InSyde BIOS v3309.

regardless, you guys get a different BIOS then we do. Here in the US we are 3,308 ahead of you :lol: LOL

 

I'm using v.3103.

 

To answer your questions:

-U8 is the SPI part containing the BIOS.
-The BIOS is a UEFI BIOS with a CSM (http://www.tianocore.org)
-The difference between UEFI and Legacy is basically that UEFI is an industry spec approach that is mostly in C, while Legacy is BIOS vendor specfic normally in assembler.
-If you feel that unsoldering is the only way, then consider finding a person with a DediProg SF-100 with the BBF module with clips (http://www.dediprog.com). Then clip the BBF over the in place SPI and boot from the BBF. Once booted, remove the clip and reflash the SPI.
-The concept of a crisis flash is that there is a mini-BIOS that does not normally get flashed available. This is so that if the main BIOS gets fried, you can unbrick it with the crisis BIOS. If your update is also updating the crisis, then you can really brick the unit requiring the use of a DediProg or similar.

Hope this helps.

 

i have tried the recovery from macles/acer us many times
i now have a fat 16 usb i follow the instructions to the letter
the power light flashes but the usb access light does not in any port.
i am now thinking of unsoldering U8 which is a 25l8005m2c chip in my rev g aao
and reflashing it and maybe making a socket in the 3g compartment
has anybody here reflashed there bios do u simply send the fd files to it ?

 

I have read of a number of failures of the Macles Bios Recovery, Double check for these errors.

1) Forgeting to press the flashing power button a second time.
2) Bios file not renamed properly.
3) Failure to try a different USB drive.

 

many thanks for the helpfull comments i have tried all this now
with no luck, after looking at the many bios revisions
a lot seem to have recovery mode failure updates
i am now wondering if i had one of these bios revisions !
this is the second aao this has happened to but the other one is now
with acer when i read the serial number to them they said they will
send a courier , i was hoping they would send me a usb pen to fix it
as sometimes happens i have been told

 

For all non belivers, again some progress in Acer UEFI hacking:

http://marcansoft.com/blog/2009/06/enab ... ire-8930g/

I been workign with him on that, more stuff will follow, currently I am workign on enabling these additional menus.

 

Great news I'm looking forward to your work. I hope it will bring us 2GB and AHCI support

 

Cool sam.hackint0sh

love to here more about this.

yer i hate it too when oem manufactures remove bios options too still nice work going on here. this will proberly make aoa 150 better suited for a hackintosh really nice work mate.