Hi, I have also tried this several times on a few machines. The best way is to go to the motherboard site and d/l the upgrade, and burn the new BIOS with a programmer. your motherboard will have some numbers on it like GA-60XM7E. The most common motherboards used around here ase Gigabyte http://www.giga-byte.com/. It would be a good place to start.
THe upgrade programs dont always work, but they are worth a try, and you MUST use the ones they specify. ALWAYS save your old bios on a floppy and make a few copies of the file on a secondary floppy !!!! Have a look at the file. Make sure that there is actually data in it. Upgrade to the new BIOS and if that fails you will have to beg, borrow or buy a programmer to program the chip with. Do you really want to see a 40Mb disk ? or did you mean 40 Gig ? Ian -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Donald R. Spoon Sent: Tuesday, June 26, 2001 2:22 PM To: debian-user@lists.debian.org Subject: upgrading award bios to see ide 40mb disk > hi, > does anyone know how to upgrade an award bios (so that it will see my 40mb > ide-drive) either via dos or under linux and a pointer to a site (other > then award.com) to get the necessary tools/drivers. > > Thanx for any insites. > > ----------- > Andor Demarteau > [EMAIL PROTECTED] I have done this several times here. I have found that the absolute BEST way is to visit the homepage of your MOTHERBOARD (not Award) and get the proper files from their tech support section. They usually have excellent instructions on just how to do the upgrade. The reason for this is that each motherboard mfg. will apply certain custom "tweaks" to their BIOS that they order from AWARD, and they will be the ones to have the "latest and greatest" changes to make their motherboards work properly. Most of the times I have done this, the files were under the tech support / downloads sections. READ, COPY, and RE-READ the install instruction carefully! You can really mess up the MB, if you don't follow the directions!! You generally have to d/l two files. The first is the new BIOS image, and the second is an "Awardflash" utility program that actually does the install of the image file. Also, it is important that you bootup into a minimal MSDOS environment (no extra drivers, extended memory enabled, etc). It is important since the flash program will use most of the available memory below 640K. I have found here that the "minmal dos" selection on the WIN ME rescue floppy will give the proper environment. Earlier versions of Windows were quite difficult to get going...you essentially had to make a "system" disk and copy over the two files mentioned previously....and ONLY those files! I don't know of any way to do this under Linux, although I would be quite happy to learn how if someone else knows. Cheers, -Don Spoon- -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
