fix Award 4.51PG 32gb hd limitation on Asus sp97-v

[NickS]

Recommended by Wim's BIOS...

[NickS]

Jan
Is this fix a simple "patch these bytes" fix likely to work on many Award bioses or is it a case of
[voice="No5"]disassemble/reassemble[/voice] ?
Are you happy to post the details, or are they your commercial secret ?

[BiosMan]

Nick,

The 32GB bugfix I do is the same 15 bytes patch from Petr Soucek, that is also used by Rainbow. You can find the details in one of the treads on this forum.
On most BIOSes, this bugfix will allow IDE drives upto 64GB. When the drive is larger than 65535MB, another bug will hang the BIOS when it caculates the drive size for the summary screen.
Fixing this 64GB bug is much more complicated. It requires a patch of over a 100 bytes and has to be tailor made for each BIOS.
And on some BIOSes (PCChips M577) this change has to be made in the Awardext.rom module i.s.o. the main BIOS image (original.tmp) which makes it even more complicated...

So ist not a secret, just complicated.
When I have the time, I will write a piece about this in the In-depth High-tech Bios section.

Jan.

[Rainbow]

I think that my program for patching the 64GB bug (using your "nice" method) - or at least the algorithm - is almost complete, but don't have big enough drive to test it. Maybe I should buy one But don't know what to do with the drive after testing...maybe I should give it to my friend

[NickS]

BiosMan wrote:

Nick,

And on some BIOSes (PCChips M577) this change has to be made in the Awardext.rom module i.s.o. the main BIOS image (original.tmp) which makes it even more complicated...

I don't need >64 Mb yet, but is the Awardext.rom module generic ? What are its functions? Could I take it from a BIOS that's already been fixed and insert it into the M577 BIOS ?

Rainbow wrote:

Maybe I should buy one But don't know what to do with the drive after testing...

I can tell you don't have teenage children with games, downloaded videos and mp3s ! Actually, I restricted mine to 20Gb. If they want bigger, *they* can buy it. I keep the 40Gb on my M577. Don't know why, only 5Gb used so far.

[Rainbow]

Awardext.rom contains some additional BIOS code like some DMI routines and the code that displays the configuration table on boot. Some boards (Asus) don't have awardext.rom, everything is then integrated into main block.

I don't have children - I'm student
I have 22GB free of my 40GB and around 25GB of 30GB on the second machine...

Hi,

The ugly but working patch for the 64 GB Bug
saerch for

B9 84 1E F7 F1 89 86 9C 00

in the original.tmp and/or the awardext.rom

and replace with

B9 84 1E 90 90 89 86 9C 00

F7 F1 Div CX

90 90 Nop Nop

MfG
Jan Hill

[BiosMan]

The testing of both the K6+ patch and the "nice" 128GB patch is completed, and this SP97-V 0109V_J2 BIOS is now available for download from my k6plus page via the link below.

Thanks everybody who participated in testing this BIOS.

BiosMan