Recover bricked bios

[stig atle steffensen]

Hi,
I was looking around in my bios - because I had issues booting any OS except from OpenBSD on it.
I then ran a command (I do not remember which one) which then caused it to never boot properly again.
It does not even show the Bios key shortcut text. it just shows the first boot picture, nothing else, no matter what I do.

Is there a way to reflash the bios to it's default? If so - how can I do this?

I appreciate any help I can get on this, I paid a lot for the machine and I would love to get it running again.

[stig atle steffensen]

I booted it back up now, It does show the first 'boot' picture, and the text.
It's a Lemote Yeeloong 8089_B notebook.
But no matter how much I press delete or tab nothing happens, and it never get's past that splashscreen.

[Lluís Batlle i Rossell]

I remember as if there wasn't any way to recover the bios other than changing
the flash chip. I remember as if it were a removable chip.

In that case you could also use an external programmer to rewrite it.

I remember this from some readings; I don't have a yeelong myself.

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[David Kuehling]

>>>>> "Lluís" == Lluís Batlle i Rossell <vi...@viric.name> writes:

> On Sat, Sep 20, 2014 at 05:19:16AM -0700, stig atle steffensen wrote:
>> I booted it back up now, It does show the first 'boot' picture, and
>> the text. It's a Lemote Yeeloong 8089_B notebook. But no matter how
>> much I press delete or tab nothing happens, and it never get's past
>> that splashscreen.
>>

> I remember as if there wasn't any way to recover the bios other than
> changing the flash chip. I remember as if it were a removable chip.

> In that case you could also use an external programmer to rewrite it.

> I remember this from some readings; I don't have a yeelong myself.

There may be some guys reading grub-devel [1] that have experience with
Yeeloong reflashing. These people developed a version of grub that can
be flashed as Yeeloong bios replacement (or at least they have for
Fuloong).

Maybe you can find somebody there who'd be willing to reflash your bios
flash IC and mail it back to you. Maybe you'll even end up with Grub
instead of the crappy pmon boot loader :)

cheers,

David

[1] https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/grub-devel
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[stig atle steffensen]

Yeah, that could be a solution.

Are there any information on what you need to flash it yourself?

--
Best regards, Stig Atle Steffensen.
http://stigatle.net

[Lluís Batlle i Rossell]

I don't know. Usually it's a matter of knowing the flash chip, and find a
programmer hardware/software for it.

[stig atle steffensen]

I was able to fix it today.
I mistakenly thought the bios was bricked (since keyboard did not respond and it did not get past the bios splash screen),
today I sat down again, and now I feel stupid.
I simply hooked up a USB keyboard, and through that one I was able to get back into pmon.
So now everything works.
What i think happend was a bios setting that I reset, that caused the keyboard not to get initialized, then it got stuck there.

Anyways - I wanted to say its solved, just in case someone else is as stupid as myself one day.