My first contribution to the scene. I do now that BIOS is practically nearly gone and fully replaced by UEFI.
But i made my first very own discovery which i consider worth sharing. This Method is most likely applicable to a variety of computers.
I know that crossflashing is considered useless, since the success rate is really low, when speaking about a crossflashed BIOS being able to POST and BOOT and i indeed can confirm that.
The specific piece of hardware in Question is the mcp7am01p8-1.0-8eksh motherboard manufactured by FOXCONN which is found in some OEM Computers like Gateway DX-4800, Acer Aspire M3710 and Packard Bell iMedia 3710 and a couple more. The Chipset IC is the NF-720i-B2. From my understanding it is the same Silicon as the GF-9300-730i-B2 but the GPU is defective or deactivated, but it seem to appear on PCI Bus and a Geforce 9200 BIOS is present as a ROM in all of the above mentioned Systems.
The board is performed this mod on was from Packard Bell. The compatibility across the above mentioned Platforms is 100%, but the feature sets are identical. So no real benefit to justify a biosflash, i do not consider this a crossflash since the Boards seem to be identical. Once i was experimenting with AMIBCP, AMISCE, MMTOOL and AFUDOS and tried to enable more features and bricked my BIOS several times in the process, but i was never able to get what i wanted. I flashed about 20 different BIOSES from ASUS, ACER, GIGABYTE, MSI, XFX & ZOTAC with nearly no progress, all used BIOSES had GeForce 9300/GeForce 9400 - nForce 730i or ION Chipsets. One of the BIOSES i tried was the P5N7A-VM-0316 from ASUS and this one got me intrigued. It did attempt to POST and i could even use the Express Gate function from USB, but system was unable to complete POST or enter BIOS. Next i tried the XFX BIOS A7538NX3.10R, and this one even allowed me to get into the bios and use all the options provided however it was always unable to POST and hung with code 8D, manually editing PCI IRQ Routing Tables changed it to 8A. I tried a lot of modifications with AMIBCP and AMIDEDOS as i thought i was getting closer to get it to load Windows. I nearly gave up, as i stumbled upon the ZOTAC BIOS and it blew my mind, it was an AWARD BIOS. Until that day i thought that interoperability was impossible. Now here comes the real crossflashing, I tried to flash the ZOTAC 9300 ITX WIFI BIOS and seemed undoable, neither afudos nor awdflash allowed the flashing of AWARD BIOS over existing AMI BIOS even though i used afudos 2.29 SE which is said to flash absolutely everything, AWDFLASH refused to flash no matter which switches i used. I went out of my way to boot up Hirens Boot CD and parted magic and flashed the AWARD BIOS N0126WZT.BIN using flashrom, restarted the Machine and after 10 seconds i saw the ZOTAC Logo. ASUS & XFX AMI Bioses did this as well, but this AWARD BIOS was able to Boot into windows, everything in the BIOS is available voltage, clock controls and even more stuff then in the Manual for the ZOTAC 9300 ITX WIFI istself. Everything works and can be saved, no problems, no corruption. Only if i force to enable the (not present/defective/locked) iGPU the System wont post. Everytrhing is working perfectly fine, microcode update might bei required if you run an LGA 771 Xeon, prior my CPU(E5430) was recognized as having 2 Cores 4 Threads with hyperthreading enabled
. FOXCONN has a couple firstparty Nforce 700 Series Motherboards, they all use AWARD BIOSES. GIGABYTE seems also to have chosen AWARD, but i did not test it, since the ZOTAC BIOS works flawlessly and has everything available in the BIOS.
I will not provide the files nor the tools. But the exact ROM Names used are provided.
For flashing AMIBIOS i only was successful using AFUDOS 2.29 SE with the this command afudos /ixxxx.rom /pbnc /n.
Hirens Boot CD comes with flashrom preinstalled.
N0126WZT.BIN This rom can actually just be flashed with flashrom over your existing BIOS. Throughout this experiment i used one bios chip as hardware backup and for booting, to reflash the experimental ROM. And yes i hotswapped them. If someone has further Information or suggestions, I#d be glad to hear them.
Technically i dont know where this belongs, AWARD or AMI Unlocked Thread.
Kind regards.