I have had such an issue one time before. The mod didn't work because the calculated address to link to SLIC goes to 'nowhere FF town'. The bios simply isn't located at the place it should be. (FFFFFFFF-size). The dump didn't show the bios where it should be! I never could resolve that 'miracle'...anyway the saved bios showed the SLIC at BBL! The flash tool 'knows' where it is.... Same issue?
Hi Andy, Hi Yen, Thanks for your answers ! If I well understand, the modded BIOS doesn't link to the right SLIC location but to a different zone (what You called 'nowhere FF town') If I dump the flashed BIOS with the flash tool, the SLIC is present in the bootblock at the 3F800 address so, is the problem this 'bad SLIC link' only ? Or is it because, once the BIOS loaded in the RAM, the SLIC address doesn't match anymore to the good one (as the BIOS isn't where it should be) and so the link points to a FFh bytes location instead of the SLIC one ? And, from your words, -there is no way/You didn't find a way- to rectify it in order to make it 'aim' the correct address. Do You still need the HWDirect memory dump ? Thanks a lot to both of You and, please, forgive me if I didn't really get what You said !
The only chance is to try and see if the ROM image is mirrored elsewhere. From the top of my head the bootblock could be somewhere in F000:0 (or F0000 as absolute address). It should always be mirrored to FFFF0000 as well, as Yen says, yours is very strange. If it is not in F0000, then I'm afraid I have no idea. Andy
That dump will be interesting...if I can remember it right, I wanted that the affected one dumps his memory with Hwdirect any address from 0-3FFFFFFF (his installed memory) and FFFF0000-FFFFFFFF and search for the SLIC string.... I don't know if he really dumped anything..but he wasn't able to find the SLIC....but the saved bios contained it at BBL. Basically it should be easy, to dump anything (not at once, but split into parts) and look for SLIC... it must be somewhere. If you dump something critical, the PC reboots, that's all.... There is still a little chance...please dump, yes...
Hi Andy, Okay, no luck... But many thanks for all your help ! And I don't think that Yen will find something if You didn't find anything... Last questions : What about putting the SLIC in a 'regular zone' instead of the bootblock, then doing the memory dumps again in order to see if we can find it somewhere ? Will it be a useless try ? Thank You again !
You could certainly try. Do a normal SSV2 mod - if you want to try different locations then use the manual SLIC offset option. Andy
Hello Andy, I'll try different locations and, if luckily I find something, I'll post again in order to let You know... Many thanks for your kindness and the time You spent to help me !
You've lead me to the right track. I thought I could not choose a method, but if I answer "abort" (neither Yes nor No) to the first dialog which asks if I want to modify the existing 2.0 SLIC, SSV2 method is auto-selected. Then, all works as expected. Thanks!
sounds like the jumpers are the issue. sometimes there is a place in the bios menu to enable write. To see if the file is read only, right click on it and see properties..