P4C800 BIOS modding

Snod Blatter · Wed Jan 11, 2006 7:15 pm

Howdy everyone! I've recently had a small revelation, but I have some questions to ask about it and thought you guys would be the best people to ask

I own an ASUS P4C800 vanilla board. I run a Dothan in it, and frankly, the BIOS is just poor. The multiplier options don't work and neither does VDIMM (it defaults to 2.8v if I set it to auto and refuses to POST at any other setting). Anyway...

The uneducated nutters over at xtremesystems (hehe) have successfully flashed the vanilla board with the P4C800-E Deluxe BIOS, but they lose both the onboard LAN and sound. I don't want to lose both of these... however, I have been wondering (here comes the question) :

Could I transplant the vanilla P4C800 PCI AddOn ROMs into the Deluxe BIOS? Would that work? Then I would have both a fully functional BIOS and get to keep the onboard LAN/sound.... Also are there any special steps I should take or particular utilities that you recommend?

I also have one other question... I remember back when ASUS where using Award BIOS's they were very difficult to modify and get working correctly. Are the current ones still like this? Or can I just modify them and not have to worry about weird hidden checksums and such?

Thanks very much for any help

Snod Blatter · Thu Jan 12, 2006 5:01 pm

OK, a little more research gave me this:
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~srg/publica ... alBrew.pdf
And then this... http://darkness.codefu.org/wordpress/2003/01/09/73

A lot of people seem to be adding ethernet boot ROMs to their BIOS's... but the fact that they are ethernet ROMs doesn't really matter, it's the principal that adding PCI AddOn ROMs into a BIOS does actually work that is important to me.

So, I guess my main question now is "Are ASUS BIOS's safely moddable?"

EDIT: Ah, I've just compared all the DeviceID's and it appears that none of them point to the onboard sound. So how can a board lose its sound capability just by using a different BIOS? I don't get it...

SECOND EDIT: Heh, ok. The only module that reliably changes between the P4C800, the Deluxe and the -E Deluxe is 1B. I have no idea what it does, but is sure looks like the one to swap around. So if I can swap the 1B module from the "vanilla" BIOS into the Deluxe one, that might do it...