dual bios OR top hat flash,what's better? failproof flashing

franka2

Elitegroup have their top hat flash socket to put over soldered on BIOS chip (probably using chip select to disable original chip with bad BIOS).

then other vendors use two redundant chips on mainboard.

what is better / safer ? is it poss to screw up dual bios ? top hat is pretty foolproof I guess !

I kinda favour top hat flash, since whatever is on the board can be screwed softwarily.

another question: many BIOS images have lots of zeroed areas. yet the amitools report only 2 k free in bios. are some of the modules wasting space?

are the 512KB images 1:1 copies of EPROM? if so, there should be quite some space maybe even to squeeze in Menuet64OS, an assembler OS.

NickS · Posted: Mon Dec 12, 2005 12:42 pm Post subject:

I prefer the top-hat flash. My son managed to screw up his Gigabyte dual-BIOS board as there was no jumper to select which BIOS. It relied on the BIOS boot block detecting a BIOS checksum error and switching to the alternate BIOS chip. If you flash the wrong bios it does not detect a checksum error so does not switch.
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