Looking for BIOS Upgrade for GCT-8IV

[rgruss]

I am looking for a BIOS upgrade for my Global Circuit Technology GCT-8IV, but unfortunately their website has gone AWOL. The identifier is 04/02/97-i430VX-SMC669-2A59GG98C-00. Thanks for any help.

Ryan

[edwin]

What are you expecting from the new bios?

[rgruss]

The main thing I want to fix is the problem with harddrives bigger than 8.4gb. Right now I have ez-bios on the computer but it is rather clunky in dealing with booting off of floppy disks and has no support for boot from cd-rom. Secondly, the computer is having a hissy fit with the 3com network card and occasionally knocks its irq away from it (which may be a chipset problem). Thirdly, every once and a while when you start up, nothing happens but a blank screen, if you push reset a couple of times it will work again (again, possibly not related to the bios).

[Rainbow]

The latest BIOS seems to be "10/02/97-i430VX-SMC669-2A59GG98C-00" at ftp://filesearch.ru/pub/drivers/motherb ... ek/8iv.bin. Looks like it support HDDs up to 32GB but you have to try it - some of these old BIOSes have all signs of correct support, even correctly detects the drive but FDISK shows only 8.4GB. If it works, I can patch it to work up to 64GB or even 128GB.
Is your network card 3Com EtherLink III ISA? If yes, make sure that it's configured into Plug&Play mode (using 3Com 3c5x9cfg utility for DOS). Windows should detect it automatically, you can then go to Device Manager, uncheck Use automatic settings and select address and IRQ you want.

[rgruss]

Thank you for posting the BIOS link. My network card is a 3C905B-TX PCI, and the error Device Manager gives is that it is disabled because the BIOS did not give it an IRQ, and that I must re-enable the card in hardware. However, after a hard restart (with reset button, not CTRL+ALT+DEL) the card comes back to life.

[rgruss]

Here's an update on the BIOS situation: I flashed the computer with the new BIOS, and the setup showed all 10GBs of space. Unfortunately, I didn't look before I leaped, and I removed the EZ-BIOS loader. This corrupted the harddrive's boot record. Rather than even try 'fdisk /mbr', I didn't use my head and FDISKed the drive. The BIOS fix happened to be only part way, and FDISK only showed 8024 megabytes, as opposed to the 9758 megs that the harddrive really is. To make a long story short, I admitted defeat and reloaded EZ-BIOS to get all the space, and spent the rest of the night reloading programs on the computer. At least the flash update fixed my PIIs problem with large hard drives. Thank you again for all your help.

[Rainbow]

So it's one of the bad BIOSes that show >8.4GB but support only 8.4GB. There's plenty of these for i430FX and i430VX based boards.

[rgruss]

Let me guess, there is no fix except to get a different motherboard or a smaller hard drive. Oh well, at least the overlay works.

[NickS]

I couldn't see what version of Windows you are using. I guess your FDISK supports >8.4 Gb drives ? FAT32? i.e. you are running W95B or later ?