BIOS Updates forum

I have 2 ancient Pentium boxes currently gathering dust in my room, and have decided to put them to better use as fileservers with some old IDE 40GB drives I have (my current setup is pure SATA). Unfortunately, while both machines still boot, neither of them supports hard drives over 8GB in size.

Machine #1 has an Award BIOS (v4.51 PG) dated "08/14/97 S".
ID string: 08/14/97-VXPro+-USB-Ultr-2A5LDH09C-00
Chipset: VX Pro+

Machine #2 has an AMI BIOS dated "08/30/1997 S".
ID string: 51-0830-001437-00111111-071595-UT801X-001_10_UTRON-F
Chipset: VX Pro-II

Thanks to the great resources on this site, I have identified machine 1's mobo as a PC Chips M537DMA33 using the VIA Apollo VPX chipset. Machine 2 is more of a problem, however.

Machine 2's mobo looks exactly the same as this image, except it lacks the brown vertical slot at the bottom-right. So initially I thought it was a PC Chips M558, but then I looked at the AMI BIOS IDs here. The BIOS ID does not exactly match the ID for the M558; the majority of it is for the M558, but the end bit (after the "UT801X") matches the end of the M559's BIOS ID. So I'm a little confused... any help in conclusively identifying this mobo would be appreciated.

Finally, where can I find updated BIOSs for these mobos that support hard drives >= 40GB? I have tried the PC Chips website, but there is no mention of motherboards older than Socket 370 there.

Edit: I know that this is the wrong forum for asking for help for identifying motherboards, but my main aim is to get BIOS updates, not find out exactly which mobo I have.

All PCCHIPS BIOSes for older boards:
http://www.elhvb.com/mboards/pcchips/indexajz.html

There were several versions of the M558 and M559, so perhaps some of them included/removed certain components/features.

Thanks for the help ajz, I will try flashing both BIOSs tonight.

Well, the M558 is a no-go... tried booting it last night and it told me that the floppy disk controller had failed.

I had better luck with the M537DMA; using the BIOS from this page, the PC is now able to detect my 40GB harddrive. Unfortunately, while it detects the size correctly, it screws up the cylinders/heads/sectors configuration.

The drive's actual config is 16 383 cyls, 16 hds, 63 sects. If I use the "Auto-Detect IDE Devices" menu in the BIOS, the sectors are detected correctly but the BIOS thinks the drive has 1023 cylinders and 255 heads. If I go into "Standard CMOS Settings" and manually enter the C/H/S parameters, the drive's size is detected as 8 456 MB.

I don't understand very much about hard drives, but I am under the impression that the number of cylinders/heads/sectors must be correctly specified in order for the drive to work properly.

Any help regarding this issue would be appreciated!

This is perfectly fine with the cylinders and heads - no problem. They need to be translated to get the full capacity.

Before flashing the M558, you should have read the text file indicating the proper version you had to flash.