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Monday, June 14, 2010

Unbricking with the help of Arduino - Hack a Day

Unbricking with the help of Arduino

posted Jun 14th 2010 3:00pm by Mike Szczys
filed under: arduino hacks

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This bricked Eee PC came to [Janzo] for about $50. Everything was fine with it, except for the failed bios update that rendered it useless to the last owner. [Janzo] set to work with an Arduino on a quest to repair the bios. He looked up the datasheet for the EEPROM that stores the bios and did some delicate soldering to gain access to the power and data pins on the device. A bit of trial and error and he was able to read the registers. Some comparisons between the output file and the official Eee PC bios file in a HEX editor confirmed that the first 80 bytes were fine but after that something went wrong. After coding a quick Python script [Janzo] reflashed the chip and had the computer up and running again.

We’ve seen Eee PC bios recovery before. This is a very simple method because it makes use of the simplicity we find in the Arduino. Nice job.

tagged: , , ,

Go there...
http://hackaday.com/2010/06/14/unbricking-with-the-help-of-arduino/

Don

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