Removing bios chip

C

Castor Troy

Weaksauce
Joined
Jul 2, 2004
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77
I have an MSI K7D Master-L with a fried bios chip. MSI sent me a new chip and it's here, but how do I remove the chip from the board?

My bios chip is the removeable PLCC type (square, not rectangle). TYIA
 
The Viaarena howto guide is a very good one. However, you most likely do not have the tool they are using and might not be looking to buy one. I recently had to do some bios hotflashing on a MSI K7N2 motherboard when I had a bad flash scenario. Thankfully I had another K7N2-L that was similar enough in design to allow for this. To remove the bios's, I used a tool from a very old (early 90's) computer tool case I had. The tool was simply a nonmagnetic thin metal shaft that extended about 5 inches and then was bent between 30 and 45 degrees or so extending another inch and slimming down to a pointy tip. This tool allowed me to slip the tip under the bios chip on each corner and carefully lift it out some. Don't lift it completely out from just one side at once because you will bend the leads on the bios chip and could even snap one off (making for a problem). But then again if you're just trying to get rid of the old bios cause you have a working replacement chip, maybe you could just pull it out from one side, just be sure to use caution and patience whatever you do. Before you pull the chip out, make sure to take note which direction the sticker on the chip is facing in relation to your motherboard. Inserting a bios chip in the wrong way = fried chip/motherboard. When pulling it out just lift out one side slightly, then goto the other corner and lift that out slightly and then repeat til its out.
Hope this helps you.
--John

edit: one more thing about the tool, it was very thin in diameter. Something like 5 millimeteres or so.
 
All PLCC tools suck, for real. I have removed dozens, with a kife. Just go around the ends of the chip, wedging up little by litte. Make sure you come up evenly though, you dont want bent pins.
 
Xenocide2020 said:
what is bios i dont fully understand it?
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:confused:

The chip in question is an eprom that stores the system settings you can play with when you enter the BIOS at boot. I thought everyone knew this? :confused:
 
The bios is actually the code on the chip that controls basic input and output, as well as initiallizes hardware at boot and allocates resources. Though most modern operating systems do most of this, so the bios is mostly redundant. Though people usually refer to the chip that the bios is stored on as the bios chip. And I doubt many bios chips are eproms(those are UV erasable). But yeah, I thought bios was just one of those basic things that people just know.
 
Eeprom. Forgot about the UV thing, heh. Didn't know about the other stuff! Thanks. :D
 
RickyJ said:
Eeprom. Forgot about the UV thing, heh. Didn't know about the other stuff! Thanks. :D
Click to expand...
:) I knew you knew what you were talking about, but I just wanted to clarify it for anyone else reading the thread.
 
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