Bad/Wrong BIOS upgrade from Company.

Hot-swapping and Boot-Block flash & Boot block flash and floppy support
Post Reply
michalan
New visitors - please read the rules.
Posts: 5
Joined: Tue Sep 10, 2002 1:52 pm

I was having problems with my slave harddrive not working, ti seammed to be a bios problem, so I went on a hunt for my board Maker(Jetway) and I found the model number(656B) of my board... i was sure i got everything I needed, i did a back-up of my current bios, then I flashed the the new bios, and reboot..... now I get nothing... no beeps no video(not even with a isa video card) the harddrives spin up, and the cdrom light flashes once. SO I setup a boot-block disk, but it doesnt seam to read the disk, no floppy light at all....
Also when I flashed the bios i got a warning about the boot block not matching or sumthing close to this, but I didnt pay it no mind sense I was sure I had the right board etc... and I did, so apparently the manufactur is missing sumthing. Below is the stats of my board/bios....

BOARD: Jetway
MODEL: 656B
BIOS Date: 02/27/96
BIOS Type: Award Modular BIOS v4.50PG
BIOS ID: 02/27/96-i430FX-2A59CJ1CC
BIOS Eval: V.656B F1.1 2-27-1996
Chipset: Intel Triton 430FX rev 2
Superio: Winbond 787 (use 89h) rev 0 found at port 250h
NickS
BIOS Bodhisattva
Posts: 3145
Joined: Fri May 03, 2002 10:34 am
Location: Thames Valley, UK

The trouble with flashing the wrong BIOS is that it won't go into bootblock because there is no problem with the BIOS checksum, it's just in the wrong board. SO if you did flash the wrong BIOS it's not easy to recover. Look at FAQ #27 at www.wimsbios.com.

Just in case it is the right BIOS, did you clear CMOS after flashing ?

Can you give us a link to the BIOS you downloaded that isn't right ?
Tested patched BIOSes. Untested patched BIOSes.
Emails *will* be ignored unless the subject line starts "Wim's BIOS forum"
NickS
BIOS Bodhisattva
Posts: 3145
Joined: Fri May 03, 2002 10:34 am
Location: Thames Valley, UK

..the 656B-C01.BIN BIOS file at the Jetway site has the following:
BIOS ID: 07/20/1998-i430FX-2A59CJ1BC-00
Bios Message: V.656B C01 07-20-1998

So, as you said, it looks like the right BIOS for the 656B. They may have changed how they store parameters in the CMOS, so it's worth clearing the CMOS.
Tested patched BIOSes. Untested patched BIOSes.
Emails *will* be ignored unless the subject line starts "Wim's BIOS forum"
michalan
New visitors - please read the rules.
Posts: 5
Joined: Tue Sep 10, 2002 1:52 pm

I have tried clearing the cmos, with no effect.... also i just noticed sumthing on your post, the ID str you gave is:
BIOS ID: 07/20/1998-i430FX-2A59CJ1BC-00
Bios Message: V.656B C01 07-20-1998

and mine was:
BIOS ID: 02/27/96-i430FX-2A59CJ1CC
BIOS Eval: V.656B F1.1 2-27-1996

notice the last part, BC and CC, under the AWARD ID's I found:
2A59CJ1C-00: Jet Board/Jetway J-656B
2A59CJ1CC-00: Jet Board/Jetway J-656B
2A59CJ1D: Jet Board/Jetway J-656C
2A59CJ1DC-00: Jet Board/Jetway J-656C
2A59CJ19C-00: Jet Board J-656

Before I flashed, I checked the manual of the 656,656b, and the 656c and the 'B' was the only one that matched mine so im sure 100% its a B....

also I found a bios upgrade here:
http://www.wimsbios.com/HTML1/jetboard.html

and here is the bios i used:
http://www.jetway.com.tw/evisn/download ... 6b-c01.bin
michalan
New visitors - please read the rules.
Posts: 5
Joined: Tue Sep 10, 2002 1:52 pm

Well I just tried the ISA IO card and its no go... no Light from the floppy.. also how best to do a cmos clear? just close the cmos jumper? for how long? and do i need ot tunr the power on?
michalan
New visitors - please read the rules.
Posts: 5
Joined: Tue Sep 10, 2002 1:52 pm

Well I did a hot flash and got the system back.... I did notice sumthing the end of the image file i was using calls the bios version C01 and mine was F1.1(F11) I notice the 656C boards had 3 differnt Images and one was F11 (656C-F11.BIN) so i tired it and it worked..... but I know I dont have a 656C board so I went back to my old one.... I am unable to find a
656B-F11.bin file which is guess what I need??????
NickS
BIOS Bodhisattva
Posts: 3145
Joined: Fri May 03, 2002 10:34 am
Location: Thames Valley, UK

Glad the hot swap flash worked for you. I'm not surprised the number in the message changes (C01 vs F1.1) with an update, but I find it weird that the BIOS with the 656B Message messes up your board which had a BIOS with the 656B message. Maybe they did screw up after all - have you tried emailing them ?

Your problem was with the slave drive - what was the problem ? If you need a patch for HDD >32Gb we can do that :)
Tested patched BIOSes. Untested patched BIOSes.
Emails *will* be ignored unless the subject line starts "Wim's BIOS forum"
michalan
New visitors - please read the rules.
Posts: 5
Joined: Tue Sep 10, 2002 1:52 pm

I did e-mail them... no reasponce yet.... and the deal with the slave it is a simple 1.2gb drive.... sometimes it would come up on boot
some times it wouldnt....... and didnt mattewr what harddrive... it was always the IDE1 Slave drive.... so I put it on IDE2 as master and put CD-Rom as slave... i think its working....
NickS
BIOS Bodhisattva
Posts: 3145
Joined: Fri May 03, 2002 10:34 am
Location: Thames Valley, UK

Some older drives were not very good at master/slave detection - it took a while for the EIDE vs. ATA specs to settle down. I still have a few drives which can only be used on a cable with another drive of the same series.
Tested patched BIOSes. Untested patched BIOSes.
Emails *will* be ignored unless the subject line starts "Wim's BIOS forum"
KenH
Chip off the ol' block
Posts: 110
Joined: Wed Mar 30, 2005 7:11 pm

Hey I know this is an old post, but landed here when looking for an
original bios for this very board...

I got to sorting out some trash tonight, but remembered that I have all
these Mr-Bios Bios's that suit these old fx chipset dinosaurs...
The board I have here is marked with big letters that say J-656B on it...
& no chip in the board...
There's a Mr-Bios bios for this thing, if I can resurect it with the right
bios...
I have a pretty good collection of Jetway Bios's, {best I've seen yet}
& even though the latest Jetway bios works on this board without problems,
i'm finding that after I flash the Mr-Bios update to the chip, it becomes a
dead board...
Did anyone here end up finding the bios the original poster here was
looking for..?
---------------
On another note, I found I had 4 boards that were compatible with the
Mr-Bios collection so far, a TS54paio, flashed & working OK, a PT-2003
FIC board, again updated over the top of the y2k bios OK, a gigabyte
586ate, which doesn't seem to want to boot, but gives memory error
beeps if I pull the ram out, so it's not 100% dead yet, the post diag card
shows C6, C3, then stops at 07, had the card for 4 years but not used it
yet so i've yet to work out what stopping at 07 means...

& another thing too that has me wondering, is these Mr-Bios Bios's always
seem to be capable of running up to 8 x 137gig hard drives, how are they
meant to be connected to the board, by adding 40 pin plugs onto the
40 wire ribbons perhaps, has anyone here done such..?
Thanks...

P.S. after I flashed the working boards, I pulled the Mr-Bios update off
with a programmer, anyone want the entire pulled roms, as you know,
the Mr-Bios updates are partial, not the full 128kb bin files...
edwin
The Hardware Archivist
Posts: 6286
Joined: Wed Mar 20, 2002 7:11 pm
Location: Netherlands
Contact:

You want Jetway bioses? Or original bioses in general for your dead boards?

It's easy to put in 8 IDE harddisks, just make sure you have 4 controllers in total, each with 2 channels per controller (master and slave, remember?) Yes, you will need to use an add-in card, there's no board that I know of that has 4 full IDE controllers onboard from that era. Later when the onboard IDE RAID stuff came, yes, by then we had 4 IDE connectors on board.
edwin/evasive

Do not assume anything

System error, strike any user to continue...
KenH
Chip off the ol' block
Posts: 110
Joined: Wed Mar 30, 2005 7:11 pm

edwin wrote:You want Jetway bioses? Or original bioses in general for your dead boards?
I was looking for the original bios for this J-656B Board...
The Jetway one makes the board work, but the Mr-Bios bios flashed onto
the Jetway bios renders the board dead..
edwin wrote:It's easy to put in 8 IDE harddisks, just make sure you have 4 controllers in total, each with 2 channels per controller (master and slave, remember?) Yes, you will need to use an add-in card, there's no board that I know of that has 4 full IDE controllers onboard from that era. Later when the onboard IDE RAID stuff came, yes, by then we had 4 IDE connectors on board.
I tried umpteem amount of different
IDE controllers in this FIC board, but it either disabled the onboard
floppy/ide's each time, or wouldn't boot..
Doesn't matter really, I was just wondering if daisy chaining was an option..
edwin
The Hardware Archivist
Posts: 6286
Joined: Wed Mar 20, 2002 7:11 pm
Location: Netherlands
Contact:

you need to set those controller to pretty weird values for the port and IRQ settings. But it is possible, I know, I did it as a proof of concept once (which won me a case of beer).
edwin/evasive

Do not assume anything

System error, strike any user to continue...
Post Reply