Reviving a "bricked" PC

[NW-Bound]

I just brought back to life my wife's "bricked" desktop PC. I was the one who killed it.

To make a long story short, I decided to update the BIOS on the motherboard, and things didn't go smoothly as the umpteen times I did in the past. The machine was "bricked". ARGHHH!

Opened the case and looked at the motherboard. Found the socketed flash memory chip, and extracted it. I was going to reprogram the chip outside of the motherboard.

Dug out my trusty chip programmer, the ChipMaster 6000, that I bought 20 years ago (paid $1500 for it). OK, I had to find the software, and installed that on a PC running Windows XP to be sure that the old software would work. I can go back to Win 2K, or even Win NT if necessary.

Spent a couple of hours building a socket adapter, in order to mate this BIOS chip to the programmer. OK, brought up the program, and looked for this chip among the list. Uh oh, there was no 49LF040B, and only 49LF040A. My 20-year-old programmer was too old.

Surfed the Web to look for differences between the two chip versions, but could not find any info. Darn!

Decided to try to program this B chip as the older version A to see if it might work. The PC was already bricked, and I had nothing to lose. Nope, it did not work. The programmer hung! Darn! Did I ruin the chip? Could not tell.

Never one who gave up easily, I surfed the Web some more. The Chinese now have a couple of chip programmers that are dirt cheap at $50 or less, and Youtube reviews say they work. Son of a gun!

I ordered the TL866II Plus, choosing a US dealer in order to have quicker delivery compared to buying it from China for a few dollars less. They claimed support for 15,000+ different chips, and my BIOS chip was on there.

My eBay chip programmer arrived this afternoon. Really small and cheap looking plastic thing, compared to my professional ChipMaster of yore. After downloading the software and installing it, I programmed the BIOS chip and reinstalled it onto the motherboard. Came right up!

Happy ending to this story. I don't mind spending several hours, or even several days to solve a problem as long as it came to a good conclusion. What I really hate is wasting that time, and have nothing to show for it.

 

[omni550]

Wow!

Persistence pays. Good job!

omni

 

[JoeWras]

Sounded like a labor of love. Desktop Mobos are so cheap these days. Was it just the quest, or was it a real powerful desktop? (I built one in 2011 that still smokes. I use it for processing graphic and audio files.)

I think the big lesson I get from your post is that The Chinese are experts at reading, processing and programming firmware devices. Who knew?

 

[ShokWaveRider]

Good Job NW, I am like you, that is what I probably would have done but I do not have a PC anymore with socketed Eproms.

I used to have a proper good eProm programmer (forget what it was) in the day for reprogramming sports car ECU chips to up the boost and fuel performance. I was quite good a doing Lotus Esprit S4 series and V8s back then. They ran like hell with 16psi of boost (6psi stock).

 

[Jerry1]

I understand what you did but would have been totally unable to do anything like that myself. Good job saving you computer.

 

[JoeWras]

I think it is kind of cool what NW-Bound did here. It makes me nostalgic, as my early career was all about EPROM programming. On my first job, we had a ROM simulator that consisted 18 large, 28 pin windowed EPROMs. EEPROMs (no UV required to erase) were not large enough to use yet. The idea was during development, we'd program the EPROMs, and once we were happy, we'd burn it into a rom for manufacture.

Anyway, those were the days. We had DIP pullers and UV light erasers. I love the smell of baking EPROMs in the lab.

 

[ShokWaveRider]

^^^^^^^^^^^^

Be careful NOT to watch that Surgical UV Eprom Eraser in operation. I switched to the fusible link Eproms when they became cheap.

 

[NW-Bound]

My wife's desktop is old and obsolete. I wanted to get her a new machine, but she said she didn't need it. She uses her Android tablet a lot more these days, but still likes to use her desktop PC with a 21" monitor to do her financial chores, and it works fine for that. The problem is that she only turns it on once a month, and because of piled-up Win10 update, she often has to "prewarm" the machine by turning it on 1/2 day in advance. Totally ridiculous.

It has a dual-core CPU, and I am going to put in a quad-core CPU, and then an SSD. Used CPUs are dirt cheap on eBay. SSD is only $25 for a 240GB.

While waiting for the parts to arrive, I looked around and thought I would update the BIOS to make sure the quad core CPU would be supported. And the problem was this: the flash programming software was too old to run under Win10. So, I tried to run the flash program for DOS, but instead of using real MSDOS, I got lazy and used FreeDOS. I think that caused the problem.

Anyway, this MB is not so old that it uses EPROM. The BIOS is on a flash memory chip (which makes it reprogrammable by the host motherboard under the right software). It's the common PLCC32 package. This package has been around for at least 25 years, and can be either soldered or socketed.

 

[JoeWras]

Anyway, this MB is not so old that it uses EPROM. The BIOS is on a flash memory chip (which makes it reprogrammable by the host motherboard under the right software). It's the common PLCC32 package. This package has been around for at least 25 years, and can be either soldered or socketed.

Glad yours was socketed.

I'm interested that you were able to brick it. I know they have all these warnings about "plug it in, don't turn it off" etc. when updating any device. But good programming can handled a problem.

Of the last fun jobs I did at Megacorp was to architect and manage the BIOS. We had hidden backups and fallbacks. We had a pre-bootstrap that was rock solid and not programmable. This would ascertain the viability of the copies of BIOS, so if one was corrupt, we could switch to the other. We did all sorts of testing that mostly involved pulling the plug right in the middle of BIOS programming. It was fun to watch our fallback scenarios work.

Granted, this was an industrial product where bricking wouldn't be tolerated. So, more costly. I suspect for a PC mobo, they wouldn't go through these costly hoops.

 

[donheff]

I’m impressed.

 

[jollystomper]

Good work! You are better than me, I would have gone the cheap/used MB replacement route.

 

[NW-Bound]

The PLCC chip and its socket are just too thick for modern electronics, but for PC motherboards that should not be a problem. I don't know if they are still in use.

Thinner chips (TSSOP) are of course soldered, and they use in-circuit serial programming for recovery if bricked. I have not had one failed like that, despite reflashing them quite a few times, such as like routers.

 

[easysurfer]

Interesting. Never heard of such a thing as a chip programmer.

 

[NW-Bound]

Good work! You are better than me, I would have gone the cheap/used MB replacement route.

I was about to give up, and to spend $200 to get my wife a used Dell computer, which is better than this machine even after it gets souped up.

But the thought of having another development tool for just $50 is too hard to resist, plus I can keep up with what they are doing these days. I have been out of touch for almost a decade, and that is a loong time.

 

[GrayHare]

With that level of skill you can get a high paying job and soon FIRE. Oh, wait.

 

[target2019]

From what I recall, you can download a boot tool, or a self-running app from Dell.
Might be a good idea to get the boot tool for previous BIOS, and same for new BIOS.
Maybe I am recalling this incorrectly.

 

[W2R]

Now that it is up and running, time to back it up completely and then look for a Black Friday sale price on a new computer for her. You can give it to her for a Christmas present if she won't agree to buy one now.

The cost of a new computer is trivial these days compared with what they cost years ago.

 

[NW-Bound]

From what I recall, you can download a boot tool, or a self-running app from Dell.
Might be a good idea to get the boot tool for previous BIOS, and same for new BIOS.
Maybe I am recalling this incorrectly.

The above is what you have to do when something goes awry, the boot tool ruined the BIOS, and the machine is "bricked".

 

[NW-Bound]

Now that it is up and running, time to back it up completely and then look for a Black Friday sale price on a new computer for her. You can give it to her for a Christmas present if she won't agree to buy one now.

The cost of a new computer is trivial these days compared with what they cost years ago.

The hard drive was never hurt, and I was going to migrate the content to another machine if I could not revive this desktop.

At this point, my wife is happy with the "souped up" old machine, and I will just let it be. In fact, she never complained about it, and simply did not care. I was just creating work for myself, on a rainy day.

 

[ls99]

 

[NW-Bound]

I think the big lesson I get from your post is that The Chinese are experts at reading, processing and programming firmware devices. Who knew?

The Chinese have good engineers, and some of them come up with wonderful products that work superbly despite their cheap outside appearance. A Western company would make a nice metal case, and sell the chip programmer for a few hundred bucks, but the Chinese just did not care.

See the ChipMaster that I paid $1500 for 20 years ago, vs. the $50 programmer I just bought. The latter claims to handle 15,000+ devices. Son of a gun!

Or perhaps they know that it is pointless to spend money on the case, because other Chinese will just do a knock-off and kill them on prices. And so, they cut to the chase and put them out as cheaply as they can.

And indeed, the eBay source I bought from claims that it is a legitimate distributor. The Web page of the Chinese manufacturer claims that its products have been pirated, and that its software may not work right on the clones.

In the past, I have bought some Chinese electronics, and there were two brands on eBay and Amazon, They were identical, but with different manufacturer labels. Both claimed to be the original and the other was a counterfeit. Obviously, only one told the truth, and the other was a lying basterd SOB.

Yes, the Chinese are ruthlessly pirating from their own countrymen too.

PS. The universal chip programmers always come with a ZIP socket. You then use different socket adapters for different chip packages.

Below is the image of one.

I ordered some, but did not want to wait a few days for arrival, so wired up a kludgy one to get going.

 

[target2019]

The above is what you have to do when something goes awry, the boot tool ruined the BIOS, and the machine is "bricked".

Dell has a tool to recover from that:
https://www.dell.com/support/articl...covery-options-on-a-dell-pc-or-tablet?lang=en

I've never been bricked, so I don't know if the tool works 100%.

I went to Dell after my first post, and found a newer BIOS from July. Downloaded and installed with no problems. But I do see plenty of times during the process where I was tempted to say, "It's done." But then another sub-process started, and I was glad I was patient on this.

And of course I was wrong earlier, as there is no downloadable to create boot media with the BIOS update on it. You have to create a USB boot on your won, and add the .exe to it.

 

[Sunset]

Wow, I'm beyond impressed..

 

[NW-Bound]

Dell has a tool to recover from that:
https://www.dell.com/support/articl...covery-options-on-a-dell-pc-or-tablet?lang=en

I've never been bricked, so I don't know if the tool works 100%.

I went to Dell after my first post, and found a newer BIOS from July. Downloaded and installed with no problems. But I do see plenty of times during the process where I was tempted to say, "It's done." But then another sub-process started, and I was glad I was patient on this.

And of course I was wrong earlier, as there is no downloadable to create boot media with the BIOS update on it. You have to create a USB boot on your won, and add the .exe to it.

OK, this is the ultimate recovery boot program on the BIOS that is protected from being overwritten, as Joe Wras talked about earlier. You need some basic firmware on the BIOS chip in order to bring in the rescue program from the USB dongle.

I never had a Dell computer, only "special-deal" motherboards from Fry's Electronics, which do not have this feature.

 

[aja8888]

When I had a side business in the late 2000's building, selling, and repairing computers, I flashed a lot of Bios chips. But never pulled any and did what NW-Bound does. I'm impressed!

NW-Bound, you are the MAN around here when it comes to electronics and power stuff!!