Crawford rescued his motherboard using the Bus Pirate and FlashRom.
A friend gave me a Gigabyte EP35C-DS3R motherboard, that had succumbed to the dread ‘infinite reboot’ issue. The Interwebs reported this was usually a bad bios, so I decided to re-flash the bios using the great write-up here.
Get your own handy Bus Pirate for $30, including world-wide shipping. Also available from our friendly distributors Adafruit, Open Source Control Systems, and eHaJo.
BusPirate is so great! :)
Very impressive again :)
I might make a adaptor for doing this, because you know when you need one its going to be too late.
The motherboard looked like there was an area around the serial flash chip for an in-circuit programmer, sort of an outline around the chip for something to snap on top and program it. However I never got flashrom to work with it on-board, so de-soldered the flash using the big-blob-of-molten-solder technique. An adapter that snaps onto the top (either in-circuit or bare chip) would be very useful!
Hmm, forum link is wrong now… this should work:
http://dangerousprototypes.com/forum/index.php?topic=1591.0
I am glad I could help with the writeup :)
The buspirate is a great bit of kit for quick and simple proceedures like this.