Programming a BIOS eeprom chip out-of-the-system.

@blackrider1; i bought a SP8-A (SPI) programmer off eBay. Not costly and very well constructed.

 

@blackrider1; the most chips sold on eBay are emprty ones wich the seller flashes with the firmware you (we all) for the most part can download from our motherboard- manufacturers. So these chips ONLY contain the mere basics of the bios together the upgraded part.
For ex. for my notebook Hewlett Packard offers for downloading the latest bios, in my case an F.20- version. This binary contains the viodeo bios, a bootloader and some modified code (with respect to the one before this F.20 version and that is the F.18 version). You'll understand that my notebook has a serialnumber, an sku number and some more specific code and wich is lost the moment i get a blank eeprom and flash the HP downloaded binary in it.
...but the notebook always boots-up. That was -in my case- always so.
Until someone pointed out to me that i needed the so-called "Tatto-tools" to "brand" my notebook after flashing into a blank eeprom. These tools allow me to put back into the notebook eeprom the user specific code such as serialnumber, sku and some more. I didn't write down all my specific user data before flashing, so some part is lost forever. I don't bother much with this loss, the main thing is that it boots and has it's serialnumber back.

Why can't you read the eeprom contents? It's fairly simple and you don't alter anything unless you hit the flash or write button of the flash program on the host machine.

The modification with an ASUS SLIC 2.1 table can't be the problem, because you don't touch any operational code, one just replaces (or fill's in) the SLIC table(s). My wife's pc has in her bios some room reserved where the slic table's have to reside, they where blank (FFh) and now this section is filled with 274 bytes of new SLIC 2.1 code.

You can try to find another person with a whole dump of the same eeprom, but then his/her serialnumber and user data are programmed in your motherboard, i don't think this is a good idea. Don't tell them anyway...
Question; with the original flash-chip installed, does your computer boot? Does it start-up? If so, maybe you can make a 100% proper dump and retrace your steps. Just an idea.
Just a word of warning, there are some SPI-programmers out there wich cause more damage then result, see some post before. This was the reason i've ended-up eventually with the Sofi SP8-A SPI programmer and an adapter (8-pin wide 200/208mil SOIC socket), this adapter i bought also on eBay from another seller (there aren't that many, so you cant go wrong there, it cost me around 7 USD and the programmer approx. 30 USD, both came from mainland China and had free shipping). Delivery time to my country (Netherlands) 6 weeks. (That was the price i had to "pay" for "Free shipping" i suppose... ).
One advice for last now, when reading/programming chips, get the OFF the main-, motherboard, you have to solder try -if you can't- to aquire this skill. The chips are small and you easilly damage them and keep an eye on the generated heat when soldering too long on a leg and/or wire.
When possible buy some extra blank chips at an electronics store, they cost almost nothing and you'll experiment a lot better then with only one chip at hand.
Let me know either way on what the results are, ok?