AMI BIOS Configuration Utility

[Rainbow]

Recommended by Wim's BIOS...

[Rainbow]

I have old 286 board with AMI BIOS (1988) with very simple BIOS setup. There are only 45 predefined hard drive types. I can also select type 47, but I can't specify HDD parameters (I tried to use 200MB 2.5" notebook HDD but the largest predefined drive is 128MB). I guess that I need some external utility where I can enter HDD parameters.
Second problem is that there is no connector for Turbo Switch - only for Turbo LED. The system powers up in non-turbo mode and I have to press Ctrl+Alt+Plus to switch turbo on.

The board is the LM-103-D here http://rainbow.ht.st/hardware.html

[NickS]

Congratulations, Ondrej. There are not many of us who still have equipment that old!

My IBM PC-AT requires a CMOS configuration program called "SETUP.COM". You could look at http://www.simtel.net/pub/pd/50213.html, which claims to do CMOS setup for 286/386, although I have not tried this particular program. In fact, some other programs are also mentioned which could be of interest in that Simtel program area.

[Rainbow]

Thanks - I will try it.

The board is actually new (for me) - I bought it for 50 Sk (about $1) as well as almost all the old hardware that's on my page. Everything should be non-working - but everything works (except one Cheetah board)

[NickS]

From the picture, yours is a fairly late 286 with an AMI BIOS. Does it allow you to get into the BIOS from the keyboard, or have you found the disc types by dumping the BIOS or using a utility ?

[Rainbow]

I can press DEL to go into SETUP. It then asks for date, time and HDD&FDD types. I can press ESC at the HDD type prompt and it then displays all predefined drives. The setup is black&white, not menu driven - only asks the questions and asks if the settings are OK at the end.

[NickS]

If you can enter setup using the DEL key, I don't think the CMOS setup programs will help. If you have type 47 available, I am surprised there is no way to to define its values. I will look for more info, and I will check what BIOS my 386SX has.

On the turbo mode, is there no option to set the start-up CPU speed as normal/turbo/auto in the BIOS ?

Updates:
1. This link http://www.plasma-online.de/english/help/almanach/ami_bios_guide.html gives some useful info on old AMI BIOS.
2. This info http://www.win.tue.nl/~aeb/linux/hdtypes/hdtypes.html you probably already know.

If you can't define type 47:
Apologies if you know all this already.
My IBM AT BIOS is uncompressed (2 EPROMs) and it would be fairly easy to patch the drive table. It looks as though yours *could* be compressed, and looking for the disc table after it has been decompressed into shadow RAM would not be very helpful. On the other hand, if it is simply copied across it may be worth looking at patching it if you have access to an EPROM programmer. I was once told to ensure that the checksum remained the same by putting compensating values in an unused area, but I chickened out and used Disc Manager instead.

I usually ended up using Disc Manager for drives which were not in the table using MFM or RLL controllers. My UltraStor ESDI controller seems to have its own utility built into its own BIOS ROM.

Good luck