News of Collected Wisdom

How to ID a MSI OEM-Bios :
Usually MSI has W6156MS (Award Bios), A5169MS (AMI Bios) or P9245MS (Phoenix Bios) as Bios OEM message.
W6156VMS indicates a standard MSI-Bios for a MS-6156 with VIA chipset instead of intel chipset - this does not belong to OEM-ID.
The letters MS behind motherboard number represent standard MSI Bios (Retail board).
The letters MJ usually represent a special jumperfree version of a standard mainboard (Retail board).
Some newer ...

http://www.repairfaq.org/REPAIR/F_Pinouts.html

http://www.amptron.com/html/Bios-recover.html


This should be most useful.

Note: http://www.amptron.com/html/bios-what.html is quite interesting, too.

Useful links if you need to set the UDMA mode of your drive because your motherboard doesn't support it:

Fujitsu UDMA setting tool for MPG series drives.
Fujitsu UDMA setting tool for MPD, MPE, MPF series drives.
Hitachi Global Storage (was IBM) page with utility to create IBM Feature Tool bootable diskette.
The Maxtor Drive ATA mode setting utility is not apparently available at www.seagate.com, so email Seagate tech ...

Have you check to see if the com ports are active via debug....

Start "debug" from a DOS prompt as in the example shown below.

C:\> debug

The debug utility will provide a simple "-" as a prompt. At the prompt enter:

-d 40:0 b

The command asks the utility to dump (d) 12 bytes (b) of memory, starting at address 0040:0000 (hex). These 12 bytes indicate what serial/parallel devices were sensed when ...

http://www.rojakpot.com/Index.htm

"Building DMI pool..." message appears when there is no DMI data in the Flash ROM. Have you flashed BIOS? If not, then there's something wrong with the Flash ROM.

There are times when Fdisk can not delete the partition table.... But a small debug script will do the job.

The following debug script can be used to clean the master partition table. After running this script, the FDISK program should be used to create partition/partitions.

1. Boot from a MS-DOS version 7.0 (Win98 or Win95) formatted floppy and run the DEBUG program.
Note - If you want large disk support (Fat32) you will need ...

http://www.computerhope.com/issues/ch000474.htm

http://www.webtradecenter.de/pcdisk/

if there ever was a harddisk reference, this is it...