Hey, got a bit of a problem with a very odd motherboard. The display is mondo off, from powerup. (This is an eBay find.) I suspect that its previous owner worked in a hospital with 75hz monitors, and I don't have anything in the house that will display a coherent picture. Board is a Commell LE-370.
To be clear: I've got a couple people who can help me with this, but I want to see if I can do it myself. I want to know if one specific idea will work -- we don't need to go trying to fix the board here. I just want feedback on the following:
I figured out that flashing the BIOS will likely fix it, and while I can use a CLI basically blindly if I know what to type where, the BIOS flash utility for this board told me that "this program will not run in DOS mode" oops. For the record, I've tried resetting the BIOS both with jumper and with battery (but not both at the same time). No joy.
Someone on another forum told me that I could --MAYBE-- flash the BIOS by booting another computer and hotswapping the chip, then running the flash utility. Both chips would (obviously) have to be the same socket type. The chip in the misbehaving board is a socketed PLCC, and I'm smart enough to know I'd need a puller to do it (no screwdrivers here!) -- I can get that on eBay for $5 or so, though.
How likely would I be to destroy something, if I were to do this hotswap trick? is there anything other than the chip size that I need to consider? (eg, are all BIOS chips SPI, or are some of them I2C, or do they have different pinouts sometimes, etc.)
To be clear: I've got a couple people who can help me with this, but I want to see if I can do it myself. I want to know if one specific idea will work -- we don't need to go trying to fix the board here. I just want feedback on the following:
I figured out that flashing the BIOS will likely fix it, and while I can use a CLI basically blindly if I know what to type where, the BIOS flash utility for this board told me that "this program will not run in DOS mode" oops. For the record, I've tried resetting the BIOS both with jumper and with battery (but not both at the same time). No joy.
Someone on another forum told me that I could --MAYBE-- flash the BIOS by booting another computer and hotswapping the chip, then running the flash utility. Both chips would (obviously) have to be the same socket type. The chip in the misbehaving board is a socketed PLCC, and I'm smart enough to know I'd need a puller to do it (no screwdrivers here!) -- I can get that on eBay for $5 or so, though.
How likely would I be to destroy something, if I were to do this hotswap trick? is there anything other than the chip size that I need to consider? (eg, are all BIOS chips SPI, or are some of them I2C, or do they have different pinouts sometimes, etc.)