Assistance with the A25 series (Toshiba)

[Chaosphos]

Ok, well, more digging...and some updated info on what I've found and done so far...

((I would have posted this HOURS ago, except the bleedin' server was down...anyhew...))

So, the initial bios is encrypted (thus, I'm going to be looking for a different flash utility when this is done, as I do not trust Toshiba's programmers from this time period to be intelligent enough for their flash utility to not run a decryption algorithm on a non-encrypted bios image...), which is half of what makes the bloody .com files so ridiculous to figure out. However, as previously stated, I ingeniously copied the active bios file with the Bios Backup Toolkit...thus, unencrypted.

So scanning through the bios file in a hex editor, looking for the F24h headers...and not finding them. Anywhere. Yet I keep seeing a couple groups of code that have very -similar- headers...start loading up other series into the hex editor, and 'lo and behold! It's got 3 microcodes...an F27h, and 2 different F29h microcodes. This confuses me, as first, none of these laptops (maybe some of the A30 series?) use those processors, and secondly, a good portion of the processors running those microcodes are socket 775...so this seems a very odd choice for the Toshiba programmers.

Think I'm gonna skip the F24h codes and just load all 3 F25h microcodes I have to see if I can get Gallatin support...which should support anything 'lower' as well...and from there work backwards if I need to to gain extra support...I'm going to try to figure out how to limit myself to 3 codes so I don't have to move anything else in the hex editor to make space, as I'm not sure I CAN put a 4th in without overwriting some of the other data...not that there isn't plenty of blank space to work with and move things around within, but I don't want to get to tweaking too terribly much, as I now can't seem to find any form of emergency flasher...Phoenix Crisis Recovery Disk seems to be rather hard to find right now (about 3/4 of the download links I could find were broken, and a USB floppy drive is not a present option for me)...though I have -a- copy or two of it downloaded at present, so hoping that at least one of what I have found will do USB stick support, or at least CD support.

Oh, and btw, for those of you who are having problems finding cross referencing information beyond the identifiers as given by Aida64, which will tell you what chipset the processor IN a machine at the moment needs for CPU microcode, and doesn't tell you a dang thing about what the processor your system DOES NOT support will need, I finally tracked down the reference sheets in Intel's 'Ark' site, and once you select a processor, and load up 'documents and downloads' links for it, you can get a link for 'Specification updates' which will load up a PDF with, amazingly, a table of information on the CPU's in a given family with their CPUID to work with...now I just need to figure out what the 'platform' number means...

This is fun :-P Almost there!