My question is - can somebody confirm whether when replacing the ECU I need to swap chips on motherboards. I’ve been told if I can get the ECU, immobizer unit and ignition lock and key from a donor car then they are plug and play in mine. Is that correct?

Here's the background on why I'm looking to replace the ECU:
I am trying to sort a problem with my track car. We have checked, tested, replaced everything trying to find the cause of the car running lean, stalling on downshift and running rough. We're now at the point where the next thing to replace is the ECU. In the process of checking stuff we found the ECU had a fault in that it was not reading pre-cat O2 sensors (Post cat are removed from tune as the exhaust is catless). We replaced the pre-cat sensors with 2 new OEM ones and still no joy. Tested the ECU and found that the earth circuit on the per-cat O2 sensor circuit on the ECU was fried. Had this repaired by bridging to the post cat earth but it hasn't fixed the issue. The attached data log shows the O2 sensor just reading 5 the whole time.

 

you need the vin from the donor car as well. i don't think you need to change any chips but codes will have to be swapped out so immobilizer and key works with your vin

 

Reprogramming of the DME (ECU) is in the repair manual start at page 1204….But you will need your IPAS codes!

 

what do you mean by "codes will have to be swapped out" how do I do this?

 

unless you have tuning software its not something a typical owner would do. basically you are swapping all your em immobilizer codes to the new dme and some other proprietary info (much of which i don't know about) . this is was done for me by epl when i needed to swap computers. many of the other tuners can do this

 

We just cloned a DME to used DME for a customer, OPC quoted him £2000 + 20% vat we have done a few now.