Anyone have Asus P2B 1014 beta 3 already patched?

[bizzybody]

I have an Asus P2B 1.10 board with a voltage controller that can go down to 1.3 volts.

Sooo, just to give it the ability to support all it can, I want to patch that last beta BIOS with the Tulatin CPU support *and* for the largest hard drives it's possible for it to handle.

BTW, I found that links to files at http://rom.by will work if you enter the WWW. http://www.rom.by Trying any link there without the www just forwards to the main page.

I got BIOS patcher bp-4rc_F.exe, REALL.COD, LHA.EXE and CBROM220.EXE from links I've found to them at www.rom.by

What I've NOT been able to find so far is exact instructions on what to enter on a command line, but seen plenty of lists of what the output of the patching process is.

I've renamed the patcher to bp.exe (much easier to type) and when I enter

bp 1014.003

I get the 0012 no more matching files error.

What else do I need to enter on the command line? Is there some file I'm missing? Will this do anything for hard drive size support? (If I can ever get it to actually work.)

Or does the patcher simply not work in a Vista command prompt window?

[Denniss]

AFAIR the Bios natively supports HDD up to 128 GiB/137 GB, everything above is seen within the OS (W2K SP4+, Linux).
I remember a post somewhere mentioning this Bios also supports Tualatin but I'm not sure.

[bizzybody]

That beta BIOS only supports the early Tulatin steppings. Apparently there's room to patch in the later ones without having to remove something else.

If it only has 28bit LBA, it'd be nice to patch it to 48bit LBA, just because!

"We do the things we must because we can."

[Denniss]

No 48Bit LBA with an Award 4.51 or 4.60 Bios possible.

Try the DOS commandline bp.exe /? or -? as this may display some options. If you only want to add CPU signatures/microcode try bp.exe /cpu or a similar option

[cp]

well, i don't intend to spoil your personal fun but...

native (which means in the BIOS) 48bit LBA support patched into a BIOS is a kinda cosmetic. it would just display the correct size of the hdd and enable one to create (insanely) large boot partitions. it is completely useless for all modern OS (Linux, Windows XP, 2k) because they ignore the BIOS information for good anyway and query the hardware themselves. on old OS (Windows 9x, ME) 48bit LBA support would be useful...but the hardware abstraction layer (if you would want to call it that way) has size limitations itself which need to be patched. and even if those are patched (there are patches out there!) almost any program could go around those using its own routines which could have a size limitation themselves. in other words: it is extremely risky to use large hdds with those type of OS. in addition those OS are buggy, old, insecure, unsupported and hopefully fading away soon.

some information about microcodes: if the mainboard starts up with the processor one just plugged in everything is fine. if it doesn't old or missing microcodes are most probably NOT the cause. the cause is the electrical interface of the processor which is incompatible to the version of the socket. this is intended and a feature, NOT a bug. it can be fixed but only and ONLY in hardware. a microcode update is a pure software fix.
wrong cpu speed display, unknown cpu or similar displays are a result of badly programmed BIOSes. most of the time they are harmless and just annoying. they can not be fixed with microcode updates.
microcode updates are loaded by any modern OS on bootup, replace older microcodes loaded by the BIOS and are easily interchangeable because they are just files on one's harddisk. the latest microcode updates for tualatin cpus are from 2001 so they are for sure included in every modern OS.
what do microcodes anyway? they intend to avoid very rare situations in which the processor could lock up or produce wrong results. they don't speed up anything or fix any detection routine. rare situation means a situation which doesn't occur during daily work/play routine or we would have seen a lot of angry (Windows) users in the past.

[bizzybody]

I flashed it with the beta BIOS, rebooted fine.

Figured out that for bios patcher, cbrom220.exe has to be renamed to cbrom.exe ('thanks' for not specifically mentioning that, whomever wrote the scant documentation) and ran it on that BIOS.

So I used the flash util the rom.by site said to use, and it bricked the board. Does nothing but blink the keyboard LEDs. Formatting a blank floppy then copying the un-molested BIOS to it- renamed awdbios.bin doesn't recover it.

Oh well, it's just an olde Slot 1 board and it was free. I might be able to get another free board to use as an ad-hoc programmer and do a hot swap flash with the un-patched beta BIOS and call it good.

Would be interesting to know what went wrong with bios patcher on this BIOS.

BIOS_Patcher ver. 4.0_RC.F from "Second_Hope utils".
Warning! Recommended for power-users!

Found 2Mbit BIOS (4.5x)!

Warning - ASUS BIOS!

1. New CPU Support : -> fixed.
2. P3-detect error : not found.
3. New Koeffs Support :> -> fixed.
4. 32Gb-problem(32g) : not found.
5. Some HDD detect-problem : -> fixed.
6. "MB"/"GB" string search : not request to fixed.
9. Error display Freq>999MHz : not found.
10.Error display Koefs>9.5x : not found.
11.New Stepping Support : -> fixed.
12.Tualatin L2-init error : not found.
13.New Freq in Setup open : not found.

14.Set "Y" as default on exit: -> fixed.

UDMA for "big"-HDD on UDMA33_only_MB fix: not found.

CBROM V2.20 (C)Phoenix Technologies, Ltd 2001 All Rights Reserved.
[CPUCODE] ROM is releaseCBROM V2.20 (C)Phoenix Technologies, Ltd 2001 All Rights Reserved.
Adding modul.tmp 25.6%
CBROM V2.20 (C)Phoenix Technologies, Ltd 2001 All Rights Reserved.
Adding cpucode.bin 50.7%
Warning! BootBlock was changed! Flashing BIOS only WITH BootBlock!

The pre-existing BIOS on the board was 1008, so just for the hell of it I ran bios patcher on it. Note that this old BIOS does have the drive size limits.

BIOS_Patcher ver. 4.0_RC.F from "Second_Hope utils".
Warning! Recommended for power-users!

Found 2Mbit BIOS (4.5x)!

Warning - ASUS BIOS!

1. New CPU Support : -> fixed.
2. P3-detect error : not found.
3. New Koeffs Support :> -> fixed.
4. 32Gb-problem(32g) : -> fixed.
5. Some HDD detect-problem : -> fixed.
6. "MB"/"GB" string search : -> fixed.
7. 65Gb-problem (1-st step) : -> fixed.
8. 65Gb-problem (2-nd step) : -> fixed.
9. Error display Freq>999MHz : not found.
10.Error display Koefs>9.5x : not found.
11.New Stepping Support : -> fixed.
12.Tualatin L2-init error : -> fixed.
13.New Freq in Setup open : not found.

14.Set "Y" as default on exit: -> fixed.

UDMA for "big"-HDD on UDMA33_only_MB fix: not found.

CBROM V2.20 (C)Phoenix Technologies, Ltd 2001 All Rights Reserved.
[CPUCODE] ROM is releaseCBROM V2.20 (C)Phoenix Technologies, Ltd 2001 All Rights Reserved.
Adding modul.tmp 30.8%
CBROM V2.20 (C)Phoenix Technologies, Ltd 2001 All Rights Reserved.
Adding cpucode.bin 50.7%
Warning! BootBlock was changed! Flashing BIOS only WITH BootBlock!

[edwin]

Warning! BootBlock was changed! Flashing BIOS only WITH BootBlock!

So that is what most likely went wrong, not flashing the bootblock as well or a scr*wed up bootblock (that would be rare though).

You use the hotflash technique if the bios chip is removable (i.e. flash it in another board hotswapping it) if you wish.

[bizzybody]

The flash program said it was flashing the boot block. I ran aflash, it asked for the file name, I entered that and flashed it.

So the patcher must've f'ed something up.

The chip is removable. I'm going to see if one of the shops downtown has an olde Slot 1 board that supports 5v and 12v eproms so I can try a hot swap. Fortunately it has the DIP style chip instead of the type that takes a special tool to remove.