SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
https://www.downtowndougbrown.com/2021/12/upgrading-a-motherboards-bios-uefi-the-hard-way/
A couple of weeks ago I found a really good deal on a Socket AM4 motherboard that supports the newest AMD Ryzen CPUs. The motherboard is an ASRock A520M/ac. It's a very basic motherboard which doesn't appear to be sold by any of the usual retailers anymore, but I couldn't pass up on the deal, especially with the potential it had for being a fun learning project.
The reason I got such a good deal on it was because it was sold in non-working condition, but the seller and I both had a pretty good hunch about what was wrong. The seller said that they had bought it as an open box unit, but couldn't get it to POST. However, they had only tried CPUs in it that were not compatible with the original BIOS version. I decided to have some fun and see if that was indeed the only problem. I didn't have an older CPU available to easily test that theory. I did have a new Ryzen 7 5700G, which is only supported by BIOS revision P1.60 or newer.
An interesting read for those of us who are happy to work at the hardware level.
(Score: 3, Funny) by mrchew1982 on Tuesday December 21 2021, @02:02PM (1 child)
Documenting the process in such an articulate and easy to understand way probably took as long or longer than the actual back, so bravo sir!
I happen to have exactly the same motherboard sitting on a shelf because I bought it not knowing that out of the box it wouldn't work with my new apu. Past the return date and it was only $50, so I'm not too mad, but I don't think that I will buy any bargain motherboards ever again...
(Score: 3, Insightful) by owl on Tuesday December 21 2021, @05:12PM
Now that you have the process documented in an easy to understand way, you could try to upgrade the BIOS on the board to be compatible with your new apu.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Tuesday December 21 2021, @02:38PM (5 children)
I used to be more interested in hardware details. Like, IIRC, can bridge pins 27 and 30 of an Apple II expansion slot with a 130 ohm resistor to generate an interrupt signal. Then I ran into a 486 motherboard with atrocious documentation. The English was bad, but that wasn't an issue. It's that they did not list all the jumper settings, and they got the diagram backwards. I had all the jumpers set to exactly the opposite of what they should have been, thanks to that diagram. Took me a few minutes of feeling that something wasn't right, and staring hard at the motherboard and studying carefully that diagram, until I realized it was printed backwards. Had I known that manufacturers had become so sloppy, I would have figured it out faster, but, still had great faith that hardware was manufactured to a higher standard, because everyone knows hardware errors are far more costly to fix. The memory configuration I had was not listed, so I had to extrapolate, and, luckily, I got it right.
Years later, I encountered the great failure of nearly every early 2000s Pentium 4 system ever made, caused by the Capacitor Plague. The hardware issue dogging me this decade is inadequate cooling. It can be fun to play with hardware. Not so much fun to deal with stupid screw ups.
This week, I've been fiddling with my old 3.5" floppy disks. They're about 30 years old, and the data has mostly not survived. I have been able to read most of the directories, and a few of the files. Yet even when a file seems to be successfully read, more often than not, it is corrupted. But that's okay, there isn't anything of value on them. The problem now is, how to dispose of them? Chuck them all in the recycling bin? Also, it makes it harder to argue the virtues of digital storage over paper, when the digital storage has such a short life. Ought to have lasted at least 100 years. Next up, I'm going to see what I can do with a 7 year old mSata SSD drive that's been sitting in my closet. Will I be able to get any data off it?
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 21 2021, @04:14PM (4 children)
Have you tried reading those floppies in multiple drives? From the description it sounds like dirty heads or misalignment rather than bit rot on the media itself.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Tuesday December 21 2021, @05:08PM (3 children)
Yes, bought a new USB connected 3.5" floppy drive. It does a little better than the best of my old drives that I saved. One thing is that, if counting the clicks the drives make when moving to the next track, read attempts on the disks still somewhat readable consistently fail around track 50. Have tried a couple dozen disks. An alignment problem, perhaps on the drive that originally formatted them?
One of the drives I saved is a combo 5.25" and 3.5" in one 5.25" housing. But, seems I didn't save quite old enough computers. The old ones with floppy drive interfaces only recognize the 3.5" drives. Their BIOSes do not list a 1.2M option, only 1.44M. They won't work with the combo drive. Weird that floppy drive support could be so selective, I had thought if the hardware to support any floppy drive was present, it'd be trivial, even automatic, to support both. Another drive I saved has a parallel port interface, as it goes with an old nettop computer that still has the original Windows 98 it came with. However, that machine's hard drive has, evidently, failed, and the parallel port interface for floppy drives is, I gather, not a standard and so that floppy drive can't be used with any other computer.
A concern is that current digital storage may be unacceptably short lived. Flash drives might last only 10 years. SSDs, it seems, have much shorter lives if they are stored. They need to be powered up once in a while, to refresh themselves. Optical media is highly variable, and fragile. Suppose I could get all the data off those old floppies. Would it all be lost anyway when these newer storage methods degrade?
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Tuesday December 21 2021, @07:08PM (1 child)
I can't remember its name, but older Norton Utilities had a floppy repair app. It seemed to be able to fix floppies that I couldn't read despite trying many different drives. Not sure what its magic was, but I'd only use it as a last resort, and with the drive that had the best chance of recovery. Sorry I can't remember the name... it was not ndd or dt... If I find it or figure it out I'll post it here.
Long-term digital storage has been discussed often here and on green site. I don't think there is any good long-term solution, not yet. Maybe paper tape or cards? And I'm only half-kidding. Some mag tapes are pretty good, but pretty much whatever it is, you just have to make multiple copies, and copy those every so often depending on the reliability / lifetime.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 22 2021, @04:38AM
BD-R and modern DVD+/-R esp MDISC
Kept in a cool dark location, even regular bd-r/dvd-rs are decent for long term storage (better with recovery codes or duplicate disks and say a .torrent file to merge the 'good' data between the two or three of them.)
Personally I have old cheap CD-Rs from the 90s or early 2000s that are still readable. The majority of unreadable ones had scratches to their surface and either hadn't been or couldn't be polished out.
For everything else, if you have a secure non-magnetic, humidity and temperature controlled storage location, hard disks work great. Many people will tell you LTO tapes, but between keeping spare drives on hand and not having a dirty/sticky tape messing up the head, hard disks are in fact more reliable. I have hard disks ranging up to 25 years old that are still running. Some have sector errors and a few have noisy heads. One or two is even only reliable if streaming from block 0 to last block (no random access), but they have all been reliable as mediums of long term storage. And very few of my files left on them were corrupt, even verified against a sample of files I had carried across to other disks over the years. So HDDs still win out in areas where magnetic flux, temperature, and humidity aren't major risks. Warning: This is PMR/CMR style drives only, SMR/Shingled drives may not be as reliable (as I understand it the shingling process has degradation problems similar to flash, giving it a limited write life in comparison to full-PMR drives.)
(Score: 4, Informative) by SomeGuy on Tuesday December 21 2021, @07:50PM
The key is you can't just throw a random floppy right in to a drive any more, even if it was well stored. You have to carefully inspect the surface of the disk first. Poorly stored disks will almost always have fuzz/mold/grime/residue on the surface. Things like smoke/pollution reside and condensation are huge culprits. Even well stored disks can have a bit residue or dust in them. That has to be cleaned out before you set it spinning, or it rips things up.
Flux level disk readers can often help with data recovery, as it will save every single bit that is readable. They can also deal with most copy protection.
Motherboards with FDCs that only support 1.44mb drives are just motherboard vendors being assholes. Use a tool that bypasses DOS and BIOS such as ImageDisk and that tool should read/write 360k, 1.2mb, or 720k drives just fine. The hardware, however will usually omit support for a second drive, just to save a single trace wire. Ug.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Revek on Tuesday December 21 2021, @05:10PM (2 children)
I no longer use a ch341 programmer. You can use a PI to do this without worrying about reducing the voltage and or possibly frying the chip.
https://www.rototron.info/recover-bricked-bios-using-flashrom-on-a-raspberry-pi/ [rototron.info]
https://www.win-raid.com/t58f16-Guide-Recover-from-failed-BIOS-flash-using-Raspberry-PI.html [win-raid.com]
https://tomvanveen.eu/flashing-bios-chip-raspberry-pi/ [tomvanveen.eu]
This page was generated by a Swarm of Roaming Elephants
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 26 2021, @12:04AM (1 child)
Yes I have one, too. I did that to recover bios on my motherboard and a few video cards. the chips don't even have to be socketed/removable--as long as you can clip onto the right pins, anything is possible!
Although I have to admit I used a windows 7 laptop--having an integrated display and keyboard in the same device really is far more convenient than a tiny raspberry pi that requires external stuff that may not be readily available for use to make the raspberry pi of any use even if doing it on a pi is an admirable cool geek thing to do.
It just isn't a practicle one if you can't depend on someone having a compatible monitor cable and all the rest...
(Score: 2) by Revek on Tuesday December 28 2021, @08:53PM
I ssh in to the pi usually.
This page was generated by a Swarm of Roaming Elephants
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 21 2021, @09:17PM
It's a good writeup but we've been doing this with laptops and Intel ME for a long time. It's more fun to patch the bios to enable hidden features or higher tier board stuff.
i.e. Advanced Menu on thinkpads or Overclocked + Cool N quiet on AMD boards.