Cyberstorm PPC problems

Hi...

I'm having a quite serious problem with my Cyberstorm PPC accelerator for my A4000.
During a flash update some time ago my Amiga crashed which made it somewhat unusable (it crashes again and again when turned on...)
I've dicovered that removing some of the memory and leaving only 16 MB on the card enables me to start the system and run it rather stable -- but still with no access to the PPC.

I've tried several times to re-update the flash -- without any luck.

Sending the card to DCE isn't my first priority because I've heard that some cards that where send to them got lost somewhere somehow. www.amiga.fr tell me that they can't help me unless I have a flash chip they can exchange with the one on the card.

My questions are now:

Does the flash update update the whole chip?
If not --- will it be possible to copy the flash data from another card?
If so --- whats to copy (which addresses) ?

Hope you can help me out...

-Martin

[sicky]

I believe that the flashrom update does indeed update many aspects of the card (PPC, memory allocation & SCSI if fitted). Whatever you do don't send it to DCE (many cards I believe have gone missing), a better bet would be to get in touch with Hyperion who have found a reliable repairer for these cards and indeed are at present looking to get as many together to send as a large batch for repair (cuts costs for many cards as opposed to only a few).

If my memory serves me right it was announced on the news sites fairly recently that they were offering this service for the repair to Cyberstorm PPC cards in readiness for those people to be able to run OS 4 on them!

As the flash seems to contain some garbage of some kind I had hoped that I could update/reinstall all of it --- overwriting the garbage. The PPC update from p5/DCE doesn't seem to update all of it as the problem still persist.

Handing the card in to a repairer seems to me to be kinda overkill if the problem is software only, so any help with copying will be precious to me.

I know that the swedish gss-data (which isn't that far away from here) is receiving PPC cards for Hyperion --- but still  -  if it can be handled by software (I have no problems writing it... alone then I surely would prefer it that way...

-Martin

[redrumloa]

HERE

[sicky]

A SEAL member Gary Storm had a very similar problem (on his BVision PPC card) and it did turn out to be the chip that holds the data.

He at first managed to re flash the card and it worked a bit flakey for a while and then when it failed again and he re updated it his card reported that it had 0Mb of RAM even though he had 64MB fitted.

When we dissabled everything in his user startup we managed to boot it with 2Mb of Chip RAM (not much use). He did manage to get his card repaired, it was a hardware prob in that the chip that holds the data er.....wasn't. New chip fitted all working fine!

Unfortunately I know no way of diagnosing whether it is a software problem or hardware problem!

Would it be possible get an email address to contact this Gary Storm?

If it's possible to repair the card via software then I'll go for it (sending it to a repairer is still not a priority :^).

Anyways my way of diagnosing that it is a software problem is by remembering that it happened during a flash update, that it worked flawlessly before, and that it still does work... (except for what seems to be the ppc thrashing ahead if it's got more than 16 MB on board (the amount of RAM chips ( / blocks) does not affect it...))

Any response on the software part will be making me rather glad.

Oh --- still... Thanks for the responses so far. :-)
-Martin