can it be done

[blaster]

I have a bios --i440BX-ITE867-2A69KH2EC-00--for which there is no support. (on-line or otherwise), making the date insignificant.
I would like to have the following changes made.
1)Remove the Pentium 2 support completely--I believe the Celeron
support to be 700mhz or so--I would like it to be 1 gighz or higher.
2) I have 46 hdd as auto detect--since they are at the 32gig
limitation or less, remove it, and replace with 48 bit LBA addressing
if possible.
3) The DMI version is 2.0---upgrade to 2.1--2.2--or 2.3.
If this is possible, might I be directed to someone with the wherewithall to accomplish it. Thanks,(blaster)

[NickS]

Quite a few of the experts are on holiday and I have visitors this weekend, but you can zip and mail it to me and I might look at it on Monday.

[ajzchips]

I did point 1) a couple of weeks ago, on a Dataexpert MBX8440 for Celeron support, too, and it was quite a pain... but there was really no need to remove support for the PII's... all you need to know is the microcode of the Celeron you want to install. The uncompressed microcode is only 2KB in size, and should fit the unused portion of practically all BIOSes.

In fact, I added about 10 new microcodes (for PIII and Celeron support), and they all fit, without removing the previous ones.

[Rainbow]

Is that some kind of stupid Creative board? I can patch the BIOS to support HDDs up to 128GB. Save the BIOS backup and send it to my e-mail.

[edit]
Found this:
02/02/2001-i440BX-ITE867-2A69KH2EC-00
(M003NL47) Intel i440BX PCIset(TM)
at http://www.tigerdirect.com/downloads/bios.zip. I can patch it and send it by e-mail. Do you want to try it?

[NickS]

Hi Rainbow - blaster sent me his BIOS and I started looking at the microcode patches just before I went on holiday, but I'm a complete novice on that. Does anyone know anything about updating DMI ?

[Rainbow]

Don't worry about changing the microcodes - they are NOT required to support new CPU. His Celeron 1GHz has most probably Tualatin core (according to the description) so it can't run without modification.

[blaster]

+The DMI upgrade issue is yet to be addressed--let me add to the DMI versions , the possible addition of smbios ver 2.3.3. Also, is this program resident in the bios extention?

[Rainbow]

Did you use SiSoft Sandra? That DMI is typical Sandra BS. BIOS for my Asus P2B supports DMI 2.0 too and it's "08/01/2002-i440BX-<<P2B>>".

[blaster]

No---my info comes from an eSupport program called bios wizard 2.10--it's used to convince potential customers (suckers) to buy their upgrade.
One of the bios programs--DMI version, produced an output that said--current version 2.0--minimum DMI version is 2.1 I bought the upgrade--installed it--and ran the bw 2.10 again--it failed the same way. Their customer DIS-service specialist told me the program output didn't matter--
I should forget about it.( Its failure was one of the reasons i bought the $70 upgrade in the first place). These are the same bozo's (clowns), whose web page promised every upgrade had hard disk drive support up to 137gigs (my upgrade had the same 32gig limitation as my original bios program). I did not have 40gig support until I installed your Creative M003
patched program. Thats why I asked about DMI--I thought I needed ver
2.1 or higher. Also, I have tried to have the reseller exchange my 1.0Aghz
Celeron CPU (Tualatin) for a Coppermine core--they will not, and have sent me to Intel--no help there either--they tell me incompatability is not part of warranty. I am still working on it.---blaster Michael Monosky

[HeLRaZR]

WOW!

Finally after weeks of searching I've I think I've found the right place. I guess the gist of my post is directed towards Rainbow who did the hard drive mod for my Creative BlasterBoard model M003. The bios you modded already is "M003nl47.bin". Now I'll have to test it at home tonight but here is what I'm wondering. This board can run with virtually any coppermine or tualatin(with Powerleap or Upgradeware tualatin to slot1adapters) processors, however, I notice a funky issue with the way the processors themselves are recognized. Anything over 900MHz is not recognized correctly speedwise it just tosses out a hex reading I think. Also, even with the FSB set to 133 via mainboard jumpers, a PIII 1 GHZ with 133 FSB is recognized as a PIII @ 750MHz. Which is the correct multiplier but X 100FSB. Is there any way to have processors recognized correctly by the BIOS:

a- For speeds faster than 900MHz
b- For processors with a 133MHz FSB

Damn what a cool website! I am going to post this and go back to reading what my search results turned up...