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Need help to recover Bios on Intel BL440ZX / Tek TDS 8000 scope

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Tracker:
Hello Guys!
I'm not sure if this question should be in Repair, Vintage computing or here ... so apologies to the mods if its in the wrong Forum.

I have a nice Tektronix TDS 8000 digital Scope which uses an Intel Motherboard BL440ZX and Win 98 OS.
However it wont boot and wont enter Bios either, the 'Entering Bios' tag appears but flashes then the boot fails.
Upon investigation I found the Bios battery to be totally flat, so most likely the MB Bios is corrupted.

With the battery replaced it still wont boot into BIOS, so it must be corrupt.
The MB Manual talks about Bios recovery via Diskette, it says the files are available from Intel.
However I can only find a BIOS upgrade .exe on the Intel website which wont run on my PC, it's probably way too old!
No mention of the recovery files anywhere!

Intel wont help, they last supported motherboards in 2016, and their forums don't seem very active.

So...
Has anyone got any idea how I can obtain the recovery files for the Diskette for this old MB?

Thanks

Tracker

 

Ampera:
A. The "BIOS battery" isn't for the BIOS. Firmwares on these boards were stored on flash memory, and while it could definitely be corrupted (or even the flash could have gone dead by now), the battery most certainly would not have been the cause. The only purpose it serves is for the RTC

B. Indeed these systems have the ability to very quickly flash the BIOS via floppy. You said you had the EXE? Well that's all you need as it contains the BIOS within it. Simply extract the contents of the EXE (7zip works) and find the BIOS image. dd this to a floppy diskette, and then follow the instructions to flash. This does not mean copy the file to the diskette, this means bit for bit write the information in the image to one. Some USB floppy drives, as far as I am aware, cannot do this, so you may have to use a real floppy controller.

Tracker:
Hi Ampera,
Many thanks for this invaluable steer...  :-+

I have extracted the BIOS.REC file from the Intel provided .exe file.
Next issue is that I no longer have any PC with a 3.5" disk drive, it's been years since I had one.

The Intel web site talks of USB and CD recovery options, along with Diskette.
https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/articles/000005630/boards-and-kits.html

Now the TDS8000 just happens to have a USB and CD drive hooked up to the  Intel BL440ZX MB.
I will first try to use the USB drive option , I have an old 2GB USB stick which may work.

Do I still need to do a bit for bit write on the USB?

 

 

magic:
On normal motherboards it also powers a small RAM which holds some BIOS configuration data. This could in theory cause problem if the data are garbled rather than zeroed out and the BIOS is lousy and doesn't checksum anything.

Equally well something else may be wrong, perhaps the RTC hasn't even worked for a while and the machine died only recently? It could be borked flash or anything else, like a spilled capacitor somewhere.

Did you download this?
https://downloadcenter.intel.com/download/7567/BIOS-Update-BL440ZX-?product=50298

It says it's an EXE which needs to be run under DOS to unpack itself and create a script RUN.BAT which performs the actual upgrade. It is possible to create a bootable DOS installation on a pendrive, put that EXE file there, boot it, run the EXE and perform the upgrade. Look up some instructions on the Internet.

I am not however sure if i440ZX motherboards supported USB booting, although they surely supported USB keyboards. I am not sure either if the board gets to a point where booting is possible, either from USB or a floppy.

Tracker:
The TDS 8000 has been unused for several years, possibly 10 .

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