Recovering My Asus EEE's Corrupted BIOS: The hard (but cost-effective) way

(this is my post from a forum dated September 05, 2009, I am just reposting it here)

Hello,

As of yesterday, I pulled out my Asus EEE from Asus service center due to very high repair cost. Almost 200USD around 10,000pesos... But.... I am so happy that I had revived my Asus EEE... As from my story, the bootblock was erased and I tried all the tricks for bootblock recovery techniques I found on the net and without luck.

It took me two complete days to recover this little machine in a hard way. I opened my Asus EEE PC with the steps here: http://forum.eeeuser.com/viewtopic.php?id=6036

Then I saw the BIOS IC and removed it from the board using a soldering iron

From there, I obtained a datasheet from Winbond W25X40 4M-Bit Flash and read and studied all the instructions. From there, I developed the circuit, firmware, and software for flashing. Here is the software created in C# I had just created this morning to flash my BIOS:

Here is the circuit I created (on breadboard hehe). I used a PIC16f628A (through UART @115200bps) because my parallel port is already damaged. Used SDCC as the compiler.

After programming and verifying using the software I created, I tried to temporarily wire it to see if it works:

And it worked!

My Asus EEE is up and running again!

I am so happy!!! ^_^


Update (Dec 4 2009):

I had just updated my BIOS Flasher to version 00.08.02 (written in C#)

Update (Jan 17, 2016):

I updated this entry due to deletion of image from ImageShack's server.

Update (Sep 3, 2016)

The firmware source code for the PIC16F628A BIOS programmer is in Github: Link