Lately, I’ve been messing around with overclocking some old socket 478 Celerons. Thinking it might improve stability on one of my boards (specifically a Foxconn 650M02-G-6EL which uses an Award V6 bios as that might be relevant), I decided that I would flash a new version of the BIOS, and as the title reads, it didn’t go so well. Luckily, I had the foresight not to flash the bootblock bios, and now I’m stuck with it asking for a bootable floppy to recover from. Normally, that would sound like a fairly easy recovery situation, however nothing I do can coax it into booting a floppy. My question is this: What special sauce do I need to put on a floppy to persuade the bootblock bios to like it? Thanks.
So do you have a bootable MS-DOS diskette or one that you confirmed will boot from another machine ?
If so what error message are you getting or is the broken motherboard just not liking any bootable diskette ?
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The MSDOS command to create a bootable floppy was: FORMAT A: /S
But you can download a FreeDOS boot floppy image is on this page: https://www.freedos.org/download/
Or you could try similar from:
http://www.fdos.org/bootdisks/
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Hey, sorry I wasn’t totally clear in my original post. I have tried several diskettes that are bootable in other machines, and this board refuses to boot from any of them. I have also tried changing floppy drives, and even after using one that worked with another machine it still refuses to use it to boot. What essentially happens is the board boots up saying “Award BootBlock BIOS v1.0” and then proceeds to say “Detecting floppy drive A media…” and scrubs the heads around on the floppy drive before proceeding to give an error beep and say “Insert system disk and press enter” and this cycle repeats itself if you press enter. This error persists across every floppy I’ve tried, and I have also tried the instructions here to no avail. Thanks for the help.
Hey, thanks for the help. I have tried several different bootable MSDOS disks with this board and it simply gives me the same error message that I mentioned in the above reply. It does seem to acknowledge that there is a disk with something on it in the drive because the drive has a much longer seek compared to when there is nothing on the disk/there is no disk in the drive.
OK, I think I have found an answer for you. You need to have a BIOS image on the floppy you boot from, this is then used to rescue the PC.
Try following the steps in here: https://www.oocities.org/rrbhaius/recoverbios.pdf
The fact the you say you have an Award bios and it won’t boot off a basic boot disk is worrying though as the instructions to rescue an award bios require you to modify an autoexec.bat.
Hope it helps.
Thanks for the help, unfortunately it didn’t yield any results 
I’m thinking I might be better off just picking up another cheap board to mess around with. I might try desoldering the BIOS chip and hot flashing it with another board, not sure how that would turn out though.
Seems like it’s bricked.
Most of the time you can program them in circuit. A lot of times there is an SPI bus somewhere near the BIOS chip, other times you need to hook directly onto the bios chip itself.
If you are comfortable desoldering the chip I am sure you will be comfortable soldering to the pins.
Can you post a picture of the BIOS chip?
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This is the exact route I would go Glad you’re on it. I will totally help set up SPI if that’s going to be a thing though. MISO love it 
… bad joke
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I LOLed though 
EDIT:
Judging by the pic it could look like an AT29C010A or the like.
Datasheet: https://www.digchip.com/datasheets/parts/datasheet/054/AT29C010A-70JI-pdf.php
It’s 5V so you could probably flash it with an Arduino and some shift registers.
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Yeah this probably wouldn’t be hard for US lol. He could find a preflashed one to solder back on.
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Yeah, my first plan was to look for an SPI bus but if there is one present on this board I was unable to locate it. Here’s a pic of the chip, it’s an SST 39VFO20. I actually checked Ebay for preflashed replacements but since this motherboard seems to have been fairly uncommon (or at least so worthless that nobody cares to sell them), there are none available.
If there’s an easier route than popping the chip off the board and then soldering it back on, feel free to suggest it. I’m fairly comfortable with soldering on this board, as I’ve already voltmodded it and added additional capacitance for Vcore.
It’s a parallel EEPROM/CMOS chip of some sort, you will need a lot of those pins to program it. I would probably just pop it out with some hot air and program it externally.
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I figured that was probably going to the be easiest route. I’m probably gonna go ahead and see if I can dig up a socket for it while I’m at it in case I ever have any more… incidents with this board. Thanks for the help.
If you don’t want to solder you can try clips
Ngl that would probably be the best option if I could find clips for this form factor of chip (also apologies for bumping a 4 month old thread).