bios human interface

blaster · Posted: Mon Jul 15, 2002 11:23 am Post subject: bios human interface

many of the problems stated in forums are the result of bios unknowns, ie: hdd size supported, cpu types/speeds supported, etc. I am surprised no one has created a program that identifies the bios on board code with a human interface that translates bios capabilities into a readable form. Any takers?

th · Legacy means reliability Joined: 21 Mar 2002 Posts: 113

It's a difficult issue, because you can not retrieve all the information you need from the Bios alone.

CPU Support: You can only display, what is built into the Bios and not, what the board actually can handle.
Either the board supports less than built into the Bios (very common for PIII boards where you have the same bios for different board revisions, with or without cuMine support, but cuMine built into Bios) or some Socket 7 boards which actually can handle more CPUs than built into the Bios (Some family members missing).

Features Support: Some Features (UDMA, USB, 100MHz FSB) depend on revisions of the mounted chips. Bios can only give a hint.

Bye
Thomas
_________________
286-16/NEAT Chipset/4 MB Mem/40 MB HDD/512kB Tridet/WfW

blaster · Posted: Thu Jul 25, 2002 1:38 pm Post subject:

you might have missed my point. I am not asking about a tea leaf reading to predict the future, but only a program to specify what the bios contains. usually the manual for motherboards is most accurate at the time of issue. As faster cpu's(as an example) become available, bios's are updated to support the faster cpu's, but the manuals do not follow suite.I have two identical motherboards--after a year of debug, one runs happily with a pentium 3 900mhz cpu. I purchased a 1gighz celeron cpu for the second mb, and the unit will not boot. I have concluded that this cpu is not in the bios library, thus causing the discribed failure. Thanks, blaster

ajzchips · Posted: Thu Jul 25, 2002 1:53 pm Post subject:

For that particular case (CPU detection), the latest versions of CBROM (AWARD) will tell you what microcode updates are included within the BIOS.