Flash a dell with an intel bios? Truth or dare?

[pheidius]

Hey all. I have a Dell 4500. No! This is not my fault. Kid number three went to college and crashed and burned. I had to repossess said puker. I mean puter. Anywho I have a theory. I am thinking I am on to something as Dell will not allow my theory to stay on its "Ask us your hardest questions" forum for longer than two hours. I now know that this is a D845EPT2 Intell board. Its current bios string is pt84520a.10a.0020p.04.0209100915 This looks to me as if it is telling me that I have the a04 Dell version over the Intell p.04 bios. The 845e chipset should support hyperthreading and a 3.06 cpu. Not knowing any better, I thought I would ask Dell tech support.Technical support rep 1 says no upgrade is available at all(I have a 2.4 in it now). Technical support 2 Rep says I have an 865 chipset(if that is true than this board will soon meet with a drop of water so that they can replace this board with another 865. Gee. I guess hyperthreading would not be a problem then. Tech support rep three finally decided I have an 845e chipset which could go to 2.8(Sis squealed in delight at being right all along). I guess I am glad I didn’t have a glass of water near at hand. In any case, Dell's ao4 bios revision does not claim to support hyperthreading. Yet all versions of the Intel 845e chipset supported hyperthreading from the get-go according to Intel's product sheets. I think that Dell wants to hold on to that little secret as a strategy to preserve model line demarcation and incentivize nOObs to buy entire new systems. That is fine if Dell has decided to market only to nOObs. If that is the case then I will be sure to never buy one from them again as I would be overqualified in this strategy’s eyes.. In any case, the p.o6 revision is the one that enables hyperthreading. Oddly enough, though, the p.07 kills it. I suspect from reading forum topics where people have put a 478-pin 533 bus -3+ ghz chip is that overheating may be the issue. Intell support sez it was all a mistake and was never meant to be put in on revision 6. It took three e-mails back and forth for them to say this(they were speaking weaseleeese) and never did give a reason why. In the above mentioned forum topics, they say the machine runs slower and that the chip runs very hot. These instances are with people who still have the a04 Dell bios so hyperthreading is not even in play yet. If this is the case, then an agressive cooling solution may be better than giving up on hyperhthreading entirely.(any sugestions on that head would also be appreciated given Dell's weasel architecture) It also may be the case that hyperthreaded enabled boards do run slower on apps that were not written for it,but that modern mediamedia appz run faster. In revision 6 the footnotes had it that there was a bios switch so that you could boot with ht on or off. If this is the case, they might have dumped it because too many people could not handle this issue. Then again they may have dumped it because Dell noticed and got pissed off because this threatened its abiltiy to lie with impunity. Finaly, it just may not work. Maybe Dell's unique heat sink holes ran right through an important resistor. If my logic is correct, how should I procede? Would I be better off starting from scratch and completely reloading everything.Intell gives directions for both approaches. Ignoring the "don't ever expect to do anything quickly on a computer" maxim, what would happen if I used the Intell chipset software now and tried to reflash it with their automated updater(Beside copious prayer and scrupulous backups). Do you have to reflash every bios in order before you get to the one you want to try, or can you just jump right to the one you want? Also does anyone know if the dell Bios reserves its "boot from floopy" space on the bios chip in case of interrupted or erroneus flashes.Thanks for all your tlc. Besides the machine needs, I am very annoyed with Dell right now and would love to pull this off and then get it into their, "Ask us anything, your toughest questions, your stongest criticisms.. O.. but not that question: that is a state secret!" forum.

gg

[zonxar]

If you haven't already seen this, here is a link that references what you are up against:
http://delltalk.us.dell.com/supportforu ... ios#M23664

[pheidius]

While somethings in that forum may be true, it is NOT a valid source of information as Dell deletes any posts which disagree with its party line.
It will not allow any posts which argue it can be done nor any posts with any of the real technical isssues involved. Ie. the nature of its bios code standard binary: yes /no, Does it have a reserved boot flash partition in bios Yes/no, What kind of utilities can give you a .dmp file for the complete bios segement. If Dell would just come clean about these issues it would be one thing. If they said something like this, "We deliberately asked Intel to make a motherboard which would make hyperthreading unavailable on a chipset that should have supported it so that we could justify the price difference between the 4000 and 800 series Dimensions," and also reported that Intell responded by saying "gee we can't disable our native chipset because we sell this exact same board under our one name but we could make it so that a person who did this to "your" board could not get power into it, or we could disable its ability to have a sound card, it would be one thing. At least Dell would be an honest weasel"(appologies to all weasel, stoat, or ferret owners). Dells's lack of fundamental honesty on this issue makes me much more likely to blow a little money to buy a blank bios chip from Intell for their board just for the sake of truth. Had they been honest, I would have just upgraded my board and moved on.

[zonxar]

It looks as though the board uses a PLCC BIOS chip. If it is a socketed chip you can have a replacement programmed with the Intel BIOS file by services such as http://www.badflash.com/. If the chip is soldered to the motherboard, I think you're out of luck, other than going the dare route.

[pheidius]

Thanks for chip info. Wouldn't that be a bite if Dell did solder the chip in. I thought all makers stopped doing that years ago. If that is the case, I will likely remain in the very very anti dell camp for years to come. I will open it up and look later today. I found a 4 disk boot utility that will allow another utility bios1351 to see my nfts formated hard drive so I can save a complete bios segment .dmp file later today.Once I get that I well search the forums for an intel oem board owner to see if they will back up theirs and e-mail it to me so I can compare them at a deeper level. Will report back.

[Rainbow]

Almost all Intel boards have BIOS chips soldered to the board. They can do it because almost all their boards have recovery jumper. If your board has the recovery jumper, you can try to flash Intel BIOS using it (at your own risk).

[pheidius]

Dam. I think it does. What a bite. If that is the case then I am probably licked. Looks like atholon boards are in my future for a good time to come.

[cuchilloup]

i have some bios for your table, i think than it will help you
the num. is to left serial number Cxxxx-xxx