Hyperion Entertainment Message Boards

Hello,
I would like to make a spare U-Boot for my AmigaOne-XE. Do I need special hardware to write the U-Boot on an empty flash memory chip or can the Firmware Updater (when booted from a floppy disk) write the U-Boot on an empty flash memory chip installed in AmigaOne?

The normal procedure would be to use a programmer, some are cheap, e.g. Willem, and support many chip formats.

To do it in place, as the A1 can't initialize the system with a blank uboot, you'd have to power on with the working chip and load the updater in memory then hot-swap it just before starting the writing process, or more easily from os4 as suggested here: http://amigaworld.net/modules/newbb/vie ... r=0#539270 but you risk damaging the hardware if you mess up.
On that same thread Geri talks about a dual-uboot adapter/switcher. I don't know if he did make them but that would be a more convenient solution, and iirc someone was working on a pci-based programmer too.

Hot-swapping the chip sounds very risky, especially because I don't have proper tools for extracting the chip safely.

The uboot switcher would be great. I found a SourceForge project where you can download Geri's DualUboot design files: http://sourceforge.net/projects/uboot-amigaone/. The project might be abandoned though since there hasn't been any activity since 2012.

You could try to send a PM to Geri or Billt on aw.net to see what the current status of the hw is. Both are online regularly.

I also did some digging as I remembered seeing a FlashTool command in C: and it appears to be for some PCI and IDE boards such as the ide-flasher from http://www.loet.de which can program a variety of chips, and several versions of the intel pro/100 pci network card which have just the right socket for the uboot chip!

When you mentioned network card, I suddenly remembered that I have a network card somewhere which has an empty socket.
…
And I found it! It's Compaq 227955-001 PCI 10/100 (http://images.esellerpro.com/2131/I/453 ... P_5489.JPG) and the socket is perfect for the U-Boot chip!

Looks like FlashTool needs a device driver for reading and writing and AOS4 has drivers for the 3Com and Realtek network cards only

Is there a similar tool for Linux/Windows? Maybe I can make the spare U-Boot on Linux/Windows.

The IDE-Flasher looks interesting. Thanks for the link!

Hmm, I didn't look into it as far as accessing the network card.

To use a PCI network card it looks like it requires the proper #?.device driver.

The 3C905C-TX seems to have the PLCC socket while none of the RTL8139 I can see on google have a PLCC socket but an option for supported cards with DIP sockets would be to get a DIP32 to PLCC32 adapter, they cost around $4.

On the linux side the most similar program I've found would be http://flashrom.org/Flashrom which supports a much broader set of hardware than FlashTool (no mention of your Compag NIC though).
I'm sure there are many other tools out there for linux and windows but you'll still need a supported device and I'm not so sure about your NIC.

Maybe FlashRom could be ported to OS4, the source code looks aimed at portability and includes support for the PPC. Not sure how big a task that really is but it sure looks a lot more useful than FlashTool

I ordered two flash memory chips (AM29F040B) for spare U-Boot ROMs and sent e-mail to IDE-Flasher author asking if he still sells IDE-Flasher kits, eventhough IDE-Flasher may be a too demanding project for me.

I checked my A4000 and it has an Allied Telesyn (AT-2500TX) network card, which has an RTL8139. So it would be another option for flash ROM writer if I find an adapter.

I ended up buying a Willem programmer.

I read the content of the original AmigaOne U-Boot flash memory and wrote it on an empty flash chip. The programmer didn't report any errors and all the data seems to be on the new chip. However, Amiga won't boot with the new chip I also tried writing the data several times before testing the chip but it didn't help.

Has anyone cloned the U-Boot successfully with a Willem programmer?

Not with a commercial programmer but with my own home-made one. I built one into the external hard drive case for my Amiga 500, and used that to read, copy and write Flash images. No problems with any of the chips I did, but there were a number of Flash ROMs supplied with the early A1-XEs that were write protected. You can't write new contents to them.

tonyw wrote:Not with a commercial programmer but with my own home-made one. I built one into the external hard drive case for my Amiga 500, and used that to read, copy and write Flash images. No problems with any of the chips I did, but there were a number of Flash ROMs supplied with the early A1-XEs that were write protected. You can't write new contents to them.

You don't happen to have the U-Boot image file you used anymore? I could try writing it on my chip.