BIOS Updates forum

Hello.

I am new here, so bare with me please

I have a pc with a FIC VL-603 motherboard, celeron 300, 160 mb ram, matrox g450 and 2 disks, an IBM Deskstar 15gb, and one at 20gb

I am trying to install Linux on this system, have tried Fedora, SuSE and QNX. All of them hangs during setup. I have tried changing to another disk, a seagate that is 2.4 gb. And this works fine. So the "hanging" problem must be a harddrive problem I guess.
I think that it is the bios that makes the trouble. It detects the disk, with the rights size and all, but even so the system hangs during installation.

I do beleive that this bios only supports disks below 8.4 gb, but I am not sure. I did find an bios upgrade on fic's pages , but when I try to flash, I get a "filesize does not match" error.

How can I overcome this? I tried using the ontrack ibm disk manager program, but it would only partition my disk with a 2gb limit on my partitions... so that would do my no good.

Any Ideas? please help!

Regards
Al Bester

FULL Bios-ID ?!?

AMI and Award Bios and 2 or 3 different PCB are possible but there should be some Bios supporting higher disk capacities

Maybe you should remove all partitions from these drives and recreate them with the Linux Setup program

I have tried to remove all partitions, have also tried to make a fat32 partition using all the available space, linux partitions, and so on, but the same thing happens all the time... in fedora I get to the Loading anaconda screen.. then it just hangs.

Not quite familiar with the bios, know what I need to know so to speak But here is all the info that comes on the first boot screen.

Award Modular BIOS v4.60PG
Version 1.14IQ11

06/10/1998-i440LX(EX)-2A69JF09C-00

anyne please?

ftp://ftp.fica.com/BIOS/motherboards/slot1/VL603/

Looks like there's a 1Mbit and a 2Mbit version. What size is your current BIOS?

I think there is an 128kb and a 256 kb version, I have the 128 kb, at least thats the size of the bios bin file I backed up. But the downloadable, at least the ones I have found, is 256 kb

Are you sure with 1.14IQ14 as Bios revision ?
IQ is unknown/not supported - OEM mainboard ?

HP Vectra I think.

Denniss wrote:Are you sure with 1.14IQ14 as Bios revision ?
IQ is unknown/not supported - OEM mainboard ?

That is what the version says yes. I dont know what kind of computer this MB come from. I got it from a friend of a friend, that had upgraded his computer, and was going to throw his old parts away. So I figured it might be an ok puter to use as a linux box, or just to play around with. But it is no good when I cant install anyting on it, except when using 2.4 gb disk, and that is a bit small