Bitcoin Forum

Hi,

Unfortunately I'm locked into this newbie forum but just wanted to post on a common problem with the 6950's.  Google may still help those interested.

I have an HIS 6950 2GB (which is pretty crud compared with the nice Asus cards) and I was able to flash it using Atiwinflash.  Unfortunately, the card then failed to post.

This card has no second bios (reference card has a swtich) I could boot using a second card, and get into windows (booting from USB key version, so no driver problems but otherwise you'll need to make sure the drivers don't get locked up on failing card #2).  From there I could run Atiwinflash (after -unlockrom 1, and with -f 1).

Atiwinflash ran without errors (also without confirmation), but the ROM was unchanged.  I tried atiflash from DOS, but the error was:

ROM Not Erased
Error 0fl01

This seems to be quite common from google searches.  What I found is that some people have been able to update their roms by shorting pins 1 and 3 on the ROM chip (Which is write protected).  The chip is usually PM25LV010.

See here, for one, or google for other instructions: http://forums.extremeoverclocking.com/showpost.php?p=3901976&postcount=13

However, in my case I was able to flash it the first time (which fubar'd it) but not after this, so it did not seem like the chip was write protected.  Further, the chip on the HIS is MX25L005, not PM25LV010 (this is the chip on my Asus cards which are not write protected).

Googling the datasheet for the MX25L indicated the write protect pins were identical to the PM25L (http://www.datasheetarchive.com/mx25l1005-datasheet.html) so I gave it a shot.

The hardware short worked perfectly.  No extra shaders even after getting an RBE modded bios loaded though...

So I'm sharing this for two reasons:

(1) If you have an HIS card, yes you can probably flash it with the hardware mod, but it will only unlock the OC, not the shaders.

(2) If you fubar your card and get error 0FL01 trying to recover, give the hardware hack a try.