How to correct bios size?

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borg1
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I have a Gateway Solo 2150 laptop that I upgraded to a 40GB harddrive then discovered that the Phoenix bios on the 440BX/ZX MB will only support 32GB. I recognizes the harddrive but when trying to install Windows or Linux, it will not boot into the OS after the installation effort. After seeing the recommendation here, I loaded OnTrack and can get it to work but it takes about a half-hour to boot. This is a Fujitsu drive and has no 32gb jumper.

So it appears the real solution is to fix the bios. I am still trying to formulate how to go about this, but the first problem I encountered is that the bios rom I downloaded from Gateway's site shows as 513kb and the Phoenix Bios editor will not open it. I took a look with a hex editor, and the first half of the file is all FF. Can I just delete enough of the FF's to bring the file down to 512kb? Is it common in the bios world to put the code at the end of the file or is there some translation that occurs during the flashing process?

I hope that if I read enough here, I can figure out the rest but I don't see a lot of posts about Phoenix bioses. If this is a wasted effort, will someone tell me now?
NickS
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If you can live with 32GiB (34.3GB) you can try setting the drive to report only 32GiB using a utility such as hdat2 to Set Max Size, if your drive supports it. If fairly recent, it should.
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borg1
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Thanks for the suggestion. I will try this for now since it looks like I can send the "SET MAX ADDRESS/EXT" again to reverse the process in the event I can modify the bios. This was my first day back at work after vacation, and I ran into one of the subcontractors who does some of our failure analysis work. He offered to let me run the bios through a device they use which (it sounds like) will disassemble the bios into its modules and allow editing. At least they have been able to use it to identify root cause of some bios faults necessitating a reflash.

I did run extbios in dos mode and it reports 13h extensions 2.1 detected. It also reports EDD support is enabled and that 78140160 sectors of 512 bytes (38154MB) are addressable in LBA.

Here are a few other things I found out about what the bios is reporting about this drive...

64-bit extensions supported: NO
geometry supplied in bytes 4-15 is valid: NO
geometry at maximum (no media present): NO
EDD configuration parameters pointer 0040:00C6h
I/O port base address: 01F0h
Control port address: 03F6h
head register upper nibble: E0h
hardware specific option flags: D400h
CHS translation type *invalid*
revision level of extension 3.0 ****could it be a piss-poor set of 13h extensions?*****
checksum: 7Fh
fast PIO accessing enabled: NO
DMA accessing enabled: NO
block PIO accessing enabled: NO
CHS translation enabled: NO
LBA translation enabled: NO
32-bit transfer mode: NO
ultra DMA access enabled: NO


However, I notice that the bios reports 17475 cylinders (fujitsu specs 16383), 15 heads (fujitsu specs 16) and correctly reports 63 cylinders. It also reports max capacity of 40008GB which should be closer to 39063. I changed these values in the bios to the fujitsu specs, but with OnTrack still enabled, the laptop is still taking about 15-20 minutes to boot. I guess I should try to reinstall an OS with the changed values to see if it makes any difference.

If not, how big a change will the bios require? It looks like it almost supports this drive. If it is a matter of supporting a newer version of 13h extensions, can this be cut 'n pasted from a newer bios into the existing one? I am emailing a copy of the bios to work to find out what their device will allow to be changed. Of course it is take it or loose it time, so with my luck they will be on vacation for the next week.
borg1
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After thinking about this, I ran a Uniflash backup on the bios in the laptop. This backup will open with Phoenix Bios Editor, but gives the "fixed location module information not found" message. I then ran HexCompare on the saved vs. the downloaded and got several 'differents'. I then flashed the laptop with the downloaded flash from Gateway to make absolutely sure they are the from the same flash file, ran Uniflash again to save the new bios and did a HexCompare with the two bioses off the chip. NO DIFFERENTS. Are the differents between the flash file and the saved bios just the difference in the .bin and the .rom? If so, can I avoid the so-far unfound 'catenate.exe' and just write the differents to the .bin and change the file extension? I tried the windows compiled 'bin2rom' on the file and got an error message every time with no changes saved.
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