Home Forums General Discussion Technical Questions EPROM chip copying and reading

Maybe and maybe not.

If the chip is electrically damaged, the reader detect that and tell you.

If the data inside is corrupted, such that a "1" is now a "0" or vice versa, it will not be be able to detect that. Typically, the data inside the EPROM will have a checksum that was generated by the development software that is also stored along with the data inside the EPROM. This checksum is then recalculated when the computer starts up by reading the entire EPROM and compares it to the stored valve also in the EPROM. If they don't match, it will give an error. The location of the stored checksum is not necessarily the same, but will typically be at the end of the EPROM or the end of the data stored inside the EPROM.

There are many types of checksums, but the most common, especially for this period, would be just adding all the bytes together and limiting the sum total to the least significant 4 bytes of all the bytes added up in that are in the EPROM.