On Tue, 18 Oct 2011 08:50:09 -0700 (PDT), klem kedidelhopper
put finger to keyboard and composed:

Possible corrupted chip:

AMIBIOS
586 1985-95
American
Megatrends
D167887

Chip in working computer:
AMIBIOS
586 1985-95
American
Megatrends
D174223

I suspect that the "D" number may be some kind of serial number. That
was the case with 486 Award and AMI BIOSes, of which I have plenty.

BTW, your BIOS chip needs to be writeable, not only for upgrade
reasons, but because both BIOS and Windows write to the ESCD table and
other structures (DMI Pool ?) when new hardware is discovered (Win9x
has a setting to disable this behaviour).

In fact, the next time you flash your BIOS, use the flash utility to
save a copy of the BIOS at the susbsequent reboot, and then compare
this copy against the downloaded BIOS image. Your own BIOS will have
an ESCD table, whereas the downloaded one will be blank.

- Franc Zabkar
--
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