BIOS Updates forum

Ok, I've read a lot of the posts here and haven't seen one like this. I'm not exactly new to this stuff but don't do it enough to be an expert. My girlfriend had a Compaq Presario 5500 and the best I can tell it has a gigabyte motherboard and award bios. It has a 6Gb hard drive with windows 98. Her daughter got mad and kicked it... needless to say it is no longer among the living. I checked it out thoroughly and the mobo is hosed. I work in a place where I can get my hands on old computers all day long. I picked up an emachine amd-k6 333. It has a Trigem Delhi3 motherboard and I updated the bios to AMI v1.2. G/f has some files on the old hard drive that she [i]must[/i] have. I put the compaq hard drive into the emachine and it recognizes but won't read. I know the HD is good because I put it into my generic (home made) machine (AMI bios) and it boots fine, checks out ok. I suspect that the emachine bios is being an ass. Am I right? If so is it possible to replace the emachine bios with a generic AMI bios that will work without replacing the motherboard? (replacing motherboard means getting whole new machine in this case)

Hi Tim
At Edwin's site http://www.elhvb.com under Trigem there are some BIOS files which include both e120.exe and std120.exe.
At http://www.e4all.net there's a BIOS patched by Jan Steunebrink to allow K6-2+ and K6-III+ CPUs to be used, but I believe it's basically an eMachines BIOS.

Do check out other potential issues, though.
- Are you sure the master/slave jumpers are OK, and the CMOS setup is right?
- Sure there's no Disk Manager or similar software ? which brings us to;
- You say it boots OK on another machine, but are you trying to boot it from the Delhi-III or use it as a slave ? I know it's recognised but sometimes the jumpers on the other drive can be set to allow the slave to be seen but not used, depending on the age and make of drive.
- Tried it as master on the second IDE interface ?

Check check check check and check. Machine came with K6-2, tried connecting drive as pri master, pri slave, sec master with jmpr settings slave, master and cable select. I connected it by itself as pri master. Machine does not recognize drive as valid boot disk. Already used std120 bios upgrade thinking that would remove proprietary restrictions. I did not consider disk manager as a problem. I will check that out. I read some stuff on other sites that talk about problems upgrading emachines os and hardware. Just wondering if anyone has ever tried to force feed it an alien bios??? What are the possibilities, any guesses?

Well, if you can run up the drive on another machine I think I would get the data off by doing that (network two machines ?), before totally wiping the drive with the manufacturer's diagnostic and starting from clean. Trouble is, different BIOSes may do their sector translation slightly differently so that a drive formatted on one machine isn't *necessarily* understood by another machine. The introduction of LBA did a lot to help.

Re: forcing an alien BIOS; as long as you're prepared to lose the board or hot-flash or www.badflash.com your BIOS back again.... you need to find a BIOS which has the same chipset including the same clock generator, the same Super I/O chip at the same address, compatible BIOS Flash ROM to have a fighting chance. Some of this info you can check with utilities like BIOS Agent.