I ordered a Intel Q6700 few days ago, it should arrive within a month. It's from aliexpress... where the people buys stuff. When it arrives, I must pay attention to all details like contact pads being intact and if it is the correct cpu. Let's hope it ends all well. The e7600 is almost arriving here, maybe at end of the next week.
While I wait, I do other small repairs to other boards. Like reviving an EliteGroup K7S5A v3.1 with a bad bios flashing (not caused by me) with another board, a DFI CA61 which uses same flash package winbond f49...-12b. I'm not a fan of DIP chips... without the right tools, it's not too hard to bend pins.
With the bios chip almost out of the socket of DFI CA61, the board turned on, loaded MS-DOS 6.22 with a floppy disk containing 030811.rom and aminf342.exe. First trial of understand the flash tool went wrong, throwing floods of division by 0 and restarting with the bad flashed chip, I noticed the code dd-- was displayed on the 4 digit pc analyzer card and it was displaying same dd-- with k7s5a. Repeating the flash attempt again went ok... I lauched aminf342 with /u030811.rom and a bunch of switches and /x to enter user interface. It seems it was unable to detect the flash package nor system chipset. I selected via 59... as southbridge and winbond w49...v3 manually (no doubt it is a cool flash tool but it took me a while to understand how it works), then I went to file section, believing or not, it could backup the contents of bios chip (for some reason the floppy disk fat got corrupted, need use winhex or winimage and try to see what was in that chip) and then I flashed the 030811.rom with success. Turned off the system, put back the original chip to see if everything is ok and it was ok. I installed the flashed chip on the K7S5A and turned on... my jaw fell... it is alive and detecting amd duron 750 (the only working socket 462 I have available, need to get an athlon xp 2600+ 266fsb) and the 256MB PC133. I checked the bios, etc, it seemed all fine. Next day, I emptied a big Compaq case and installed this full ATX form factor (9 screws), it was not easy because it took me some attempts and at least 20 minutes... And then I installed a Geforce 2 MX 64MB VRAM, all fine. Added a tv tuner, now 512MB ram, adjusted the power wire, bigger heatsink with noisy fan, adjusted the broken pin from the flashed chip. The pc case had a XP SP3 install from previous board and started well, I forgot to hook the PS/2 mouse. Then............
Time to connect to the lan and I see something strange, the ip could not be assigned automatically.. I thought it could be a bad cable, nope. Openwrt router,... nope. Internet router... nope. Bad windows install... nope. It could get an ip with an ancient router and windows, or linux live cd. Back to windows XP, no matter the driver, no ip, not even assigning static. After many hours, I looked at ipconfig /all and mac address was all 0's. Then I looked to the network card settings and tried to enter a number ... 12 chars... I thought it could be a mac address but without : or -.... and it got Internet.... A bit of Internet digging, it seems it is a known issue of a mac address being lost after a flash bios update. I found this
https://www.ocworkbench.com/2002/ecs/k7s...0GUIDE.htm and started searching k7s5a_id.exe all over the place, there are few places where it can be found... meh at ECS sites. If we google mobokive k7s5a, there it is. We need to extract the contents of the exe and edit the ee file, I used notepad++, I got worried about it saying utf-8. I took a photo of the sticker that's over the red parallel port saying EA=xxxxxxxxxxxx. I edited the ee file and took the diskette to the other case and attempted to use the ee.exe, I thought it would read ee.dat because I renamed from ee to ee.dat... ee ee.dat is what made the magic. A restart, all fine, xp's safe mode, removed the fake mac address, restart... et voilá: Internet!
I'm trying to recover also an ECS P6VAP-A+ too. Diag card says dF--. The board has long beep repeatedly... beeeeeep beeeeep beeeeep. Need to find another victim with Winbond w29c020..-12.
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