[SOLVED] Dead Bios Biostar Motherboard Hot Flash Different Mobo

[kronflux]

Okay, so somehow my bios is corrupt(called biostar, they confirmed this) even though I wasnt doing anything bios related at the time it happened.

Relevant Info(in case anyone is interested)

Code:

Chip is a Winbond W25Q16BVAIG
Board is a Biostar TA990FXE 5.0V
Power on:
4 beeps
regular boot beep
13 beeps
no pauses or interruptions during this.

first 4 beeps say d3 on error code display
when system boot beep, changes to d6 followed by 8 beeps, then changes to d7, with 5 beeps

biostar confirmed this to be a video error at first, but then after trying many different things confirmed that this is a corrupted bios.

Okay, so I have another biostar motherboard(Biostar N68S3B) which has the same slot for bios chip.

In attempting a hot flash, AFUDOS told me that the bios file I was trying to flash is corrupt, an older version of AFUDOS said that the file size was a mismatch, and uniflash says that the bios is write protect, and also that it can't detect what type of bios chip it is.(mine isnt in the chip list)

How can I override any form of verification checks, and flash anyway?
any other flashing utilities I can try?
What are my options aside from sending this away, or buying a new bios chip?

Actually solved this on my own, but updated thread for anyone who has this same problem.

What I did was I stuck sysrescuecd onto a usb drive(which has flashrom, which is used for the openbios/coreboot projects)
It detected the bios as a legacy winbond chip(which it isn't, so I got scared) but proceeded to flash without issues. The success message scared the crap out of me, because I thought it was a complete longshot that it would work, but I proceeded to take the chip out of the testing board and stick it back into my main machine, and sure enough, it finally fired up without problems!
After setting the bios settings to my preferred settings, I saved and reset, after which it sat at a black screen and did nothing(oh no!) but I powered it off, and back on again, and it loaded up(with my settings) without any problems!

I'm amazed I even thought of this, but it worked! Hope this helps someone else!

[GKS]

First of all i would like to say i m sorry for the necro, but i felt obliged to register and say thanks after reading this very useful thread.

I have an Asus P5K which i resurrected following kronflux's suggestion. The bios chip was dead after a failed bios update from inside windows vista. The motherboard would turn on, spin the CPU cooler a couple of times and restart.
I moved all the stuff i had connected on the Asus mobo to a Foxconn i got for free, which after the 1st power failure started to act funny. It would boot but wouldnt reboot unless i removed the battery.
Anyway that was a couple of years or so ago and i have already moved to something more modern. So as i was clearing out all the parts today i noticed the Foxconn bios chip was identical to the Asus P5K bios chip.
I thought, wth, i m gonna recycle them anyway and read a bit about bios hot flash. Trying with AFUDOS gave me a ton of errors which i couldnt overcome. Then while surfing for solutions or suggestions i came across this thread.
I made a bootable systemrescuecd on a USB then booted the FOXCONN, everything loaded fine then pulled out the foxconn bios chip and plugged the asus corrupted bios.
Since the rescue disk will end loading at a command prompt i would like to give a few hints.
As the loader says you can type startx to start a window environment.
Inside you ll see the console and some basic programs.
In order for this to work you need first to make sure you have the correct bios rom or bin file from the manufacturer of the corrupted bios chip.
Then you need to have the update file in a folder that is accessible by the rescue os (linux).
While the typical syntax is flashrom -w *****.bin or *****.rom i got an error instead saying i had to choose a programmer.
So while in that folder i typed flashrom --programmer internal -w P5K-1201.ROM
"Internal" corresponds according to the flashrom publisher to your motherboard.
If the bios file is not in your currently working folder you ll get an error msg.
The bios update completed with VERIFIED.
I proceeded to turn it off, then pull the newly programmed bios chip and put it back on the Asus P5K, put in CPU, RAM and GPU and voila!!! it boots just fine!!! Got into bios and set everything up just fine.

Thanks again for a very experimental and enjoyable evening and for an awesome site / thread.
Cheers.