flashing a blank ROM chip?

[refinery]

Hey all,

Well as a result of projects unrelated to Macs, ive managed to get a fair amount of SMD soldering experience. Im confident I'd be able to swap out one of the EPROM chips on the various SATA cards floating around out there with one that will play nice with firmtek bios. Im curious though, if once you have soldered on a new, blank chip onto a card, is there any kind of special process you need to follow before trying to flash it on a PC? Im just wondering if the PC is going to squawk if you boot it up with a card with no firmware on it.

[refinery]

well I ordered a 10-pack of PM39LV040s, will let folks know how it goes...
i recently got my hands on a dual-core PCIe G5, trying to frankenstein together a flash of an internal PCIe SATA card with the 2ME4 firmware for bootability

[refinery]

no issues with flashing a blank chip in a PC. pop it in, boot off floppy, run updflash and it just does its thing.



it turns out the firmware for the 2ME4 that I got off the old firmtek installer disk is the wrong size... whoops. hopefully I can turn one up somewhere.
I really want bootable SATA II on my PCIe G5.

i was however successfully flash the SII3124 card I got off ebay into a Firmtek 2SE4. (i already had a spare retainer bracket thankfully)
https://www.ebay.com/itm/Silicon-Image-PB3124-2SATA300-Rev-E00-PCI-X-4-Port-SATA-Controller-PB312402-000/303715682869?epid=1703526106&hash=item46b6dd8a35:g:WlEAAOSwN-VckAxV
would be awesome if this one got an OS9 bootable firmware someday

this fella here is selling 13-packs of PM39LV040 chips. He accepted my offer which was a couple bucks under asking price.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/13-PIECE-LOT-PM39LV040-70JC-PMC-Flash-512KX8-70ns-PQCC32/303335715835?hash=item46a037b3fb:g:UNYAAOSwWzJds3Bk

[refinery]

part 2: great success. I now have working, bootable SATAII (and III) in my G5 DC. Shows as a 2ME4. Got it booting off a 128GB Samsung 850 Pro.
doesnt boot off a software RAID volume though. Or at least, not that I could get to work. Might have to try Softraid.