Well, was it working correctly before modeling the chip?

dominusprog wrote on 2024-09-06, 17:51:

Well, was it working before modeling the chip?

I don't know. Is the Odin actually able to cause this?

The time/date and CMOS settings are now kept.

No, that chip is not causing the message. That's just the RTC chip. You can ignore the message since the BIOS is obviously working, but the message is just the subroutine complaining that the ID of the IC used for the BIOS EEPROM is unknown to it.

related to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_System … figuration_Data
without the error you would see "Updating ESCD" message while BIOS is flashing new data ack to EEPROM.

rasz_pl wrote on 2024-09-06, 19:29:

related to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_System … figuration_Data
without the error you would see "Updating ESCD" message while BIOS is flashing new data ack to EEPROM.

That would suggest it may well be the ODIN?

ux-3 wrote on 2024-09-06, 20:02:

rasz_pl wrote on 2024-09-06, 19:29:

without the error you would see "Updating ESCD" message while BIOS is flashing new data ack to EEPROM.

That would suggest it may well be the ODIN?

No, but he makes a good point... Updating ESCD is important.

What I suggest is to update to the latest BIOS from here (2.31) and see if that solves the issue.

ux-3 wrote on 2024-09-06, 20:02:

That would suggest it may well be the ODIN?

its BIOS EEPROM chip itself, as mockingbird said:
"ID of the IC used for the BIOS EEPROM is unknown to it."
did you find this board without a bios and programmed new one to a random chip? or a chance someone did this before you? then you can either try different part number EEprom chip or just ignore it. Afaik this error just means board runs full P&P hardware scan on every boot instead of relying on saved config to speed boot up.

I found it.

"For the record:
This message means Award PnP core can't update the ESCD data in EEPROM, necessary for ISAPnP operations. Award, some AMI and Phoenix BIOSes store the ESCD data in EEPROM, instead NVRAM. Depending in the board and the BIOS program, this can mean bad news when using ISAPnP cards along PCI ones. Some boards regenerate the data in RAM when they can't retrieve it from EEPROM, so the only issue is slower boot times, and Windows/ICU utilities unable to save resource relocation for ISAPnP cards across cold power cycles (It needs to be reconfigured in each reboot)."

Re: PC Chips BIOS upgrade

I reflashed the BIOS, which was on 2.31 already. The reflash worked, there were no complains about the flash type from the flash software.
Yet the "unknown flash type " post message remains.

My board revision is 3B. I wonder if the bios is too new for my revision. Pictures show a later revision 4. Should I try an earlier version?

From the above error description, this board would be basically unusable with multiple expansion cards.

I wonder what could be the cause?

OK, I tried an earlier bios version.
2.30 gives me "ESCD updated".
So that problem is solved.
On the down side, I lose the ability to boot from CD etc.

Seems like they changed the allowed bios chip ID in 2.31.

ux-3 wrote on 2024-09-07, 07:04:

Seems like they changed the allowed bios chip ID in 2.31.

Its not about allowing something, its checking if its able to flash the chip(right algorithm). New Bios version might shipped on different EEPROMs and vendor didnt bother keeping backwards compatibility. Updating BIOS wasnt really something people did at the time.
You can still try never version using different eeprom chips, maybe you will find one matching.

To add 2c to the discussion, this motherboard has 2 (!) jumpers related to BIOS/CMOS - one for the size and one for the voltage, and until I guessed the right combination, it was giving this exact message of "Unknown Flash Type" before DOS boot.