BIOS Updates forum

Hello, I'm looking for a BIOS upgrade for this motherboard to install an 120GB ultraAta 100 drive.

BIOS Date:03/10/99
BIOS Type: Award Modular BIOS v4.51PG
BIOS ID: 03/10/1999-i440BX-ITE867-2A69KV3IC-00
OEM Sign-On: BIOS-I-2M (90310)
Chipset: Intel 440BX/ZX rev 3
Superio: Unknown
OS: Win98
CPU: Pentium III 550 Mhz

Thanks.

Edwin's Vtech Aristo motherboard page identifies this board as:
AM-647BX
03/10/1999-i440BX-ITE867-2A69KV3IC-00 BIOS-I-2M (90310)

Can you save your BIOS, zip and email it to me ? as I am having difficulty locating a copy on the Internet.

Never mind, I found it at Mobokive:
http://mobokive.dyndns.org/Archive/Aris ... m647bx.htm
Looking at fixing it now...

OK, available for testing at the "untested" link in my signature.
As usual:
- you flash at your own risk
- read and follow the flash utility instructions.
- we recommend you clear the CMOS ( take notes of how it is set up first if you want) after flashing - use /cc and /cd switches with the Award flasher.
- remember that you *may* need to run the HDD manufacturer's utility to reduce the transfer rate of a UDMA66 or UDMA100 drive to UDMA33. See the post "links to ATA mode setting utilities" in the "Collected Wisdom" forum at WIM's BIOS forums.
- if you have already used Disk Manager, EZ-Drive or similar, getting rid of it may be VERY hard. You will probably have to "fdisk /mbr", repartition and reformat the disk and maybe run the manufacturer's utility to reset the disk size.
- remember that FAT32 in Windows 2000 does not allow single partitions over 32GB in size - an operating system which supports NTFS partitions is required.
- remember that for Windows 98 an updated FDISK is required from Microsoft to handle disks over 64GB in size. FORMAT may also have issues displaying the correct size but should work.
**Please note that to simplify the automatic patching process, the disk capacity display has not been patched and the capacity may not be displayed correctly in the configuration report screen or CMOS setup. For example, a 120 Gbyte disc could show as 2139 Mbytes.
- If the drive is detected OK but the system hangs on entering CMOS set-up, a work-around is to disconnect the HDD, make the changes in CMOS set-up and save, then reconnect the HDD. Please tell us if you have to do this. Another fix may be (especially with Western Digital drives) to use User-defined settings instead of Auto.

**Please give us feedback

I am not going to update my bios, because, as you say, i have to reduce HDD100 speed to HDD33. Then I am going to buy a PCI-IDE controller to keep the HDD speed.

Many thanks anyway.

You won't loos so much speed - UDMA100 is more theoretical than practical .
UDMA33 delivers around 30MB/sec and a 120GB UDMA100 HDD usually has 40MB/Sec max

Dennis is very right, especially when we're talking about Intel chipsets, such as this case.
The Intel UDMA33 is a lot livelier than many modern VIA/SIS UDMA66/100 systems, and I believe many will agree.

For future reference, the PC-Partner original of this mobo (BXB847D, part no.35-8847-xx) has a more recent BIOS with the 32GiB and 64GiB bugs fixed:
B1120iag.bin
BIOS ID string: 11/20/2000-440BX-ITE8671-2A69KV3IC-00
BIOS OEM string: BIOS-I-2M (2K001120)
Should we recommend this instead of the last Aristo BIOS?

I would.

For boards that are identical but released under different manufacturers and models, I would list and recommend the latest suitable BIOS for the board, but would also make a note where one of the manufacturers has made available an earlier release as their latest update.

This way board owners have a choice. There may be cases where one manufacturer did not want the newer BIOS to be used on the board for a range of possible reasons - maybe they found bugs or did not like the way certain options were handled in the new BIOS, and this may be why they have not themselves made available the later BIOS.

I was having problem to install a 80Gb Hard Disk with the BIOS-I-2M (90310) bios, so I tried the B1120iag.bin and this one works just fine. So I guess we can use the latest one.

Thanks for that tidbit of info