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Need MS-5108 BIOS

Posted: Sun Mar 22, 2020 11:06 am
by orion24
Looking at this page http://www.kva.kursk.ru/bios1/HTML1/microstar.html it mentions the MS-5108 BIOS but the link is dead. Does anybody have it?

Re: Need MS-5108 BIOS

Posted: Thu Apr 02, 2020 5:36 pm
by edwin
I will see if I can dig something up. One thing I noticed when searching, even 486 boards from MSI have much better support than their Socket4 P60/66 products. I am starting to wonder why...

Re: Need MS-5108 BIOS

Posted: Thu Apr 09, 2020 3:29 am
by orion24
Those socket 4 were unique. Very high end and expensive, few items sold and probably with pleanty of bugs. I never owned one in their glory days. Now I got one for my collection and intend to build a P66 with FDIV system with this board, assuming I can get it to work.

Re: Need MS-5108 BIOS

Posted: Thu Apr 09, 2020 11:35 pm
by edwin
You mean this board came without the bios chip?

Re: Need MS-5108 BIOS

Posted: Fri Apr 10, 2020 2:53 am
by orion24
It did come with a BIOS chip, but uppon closer inspection (after I couldn't get it to start), I noticed that the chip was misplaced in the socket and one of the pins was broken as well. The keyboard controller was also misplaced. I tried to solder a pin in the location where the broken one and then read it with the EPROM programer, but I didn't manage to get a stable connection and the file it was reading was different all the time (I kind of suck at soldering).
The more I think of it, the more I'm getting a bad feeling about this. Even if I get around the BIOS problem, I still can't see why the BIOS chip was placed like that in the first place. Obviously it was removed and reinstalled, but why? Maybe the seller came uppon a dead board who had its BIOS removed and in order to sell it he dumped one to make it look physically OK.

Re: Need MS-5108 BIOS

Posted: Fri Apr 10, 2020 9:35 am
by edwin
This indeed is starting to sound like more trouble than its worth. There's no way of telling if the BIOS chip and the keyboard controller chip are indeed the right ones without seeing a proper functioning MS-5108. So, that will be the next target then, finding someone that actually owns a working variant of this board.

Re: Need MS-5108 BIOS

Posted: Sun May 24, 2020 2:19 am
by orion24
Yeah, I finally got it to post!
After lots of soldering attempts I did make a stable connection and read the BIOS from an EPROM programmer and flashed it to another chip. The board did post and it constantly hanged at POST screen.Then I changed the keyboard controller to another one and this time it did post properly and reported KB controller failure. Eventually after swapping one after the other it correctly recognised one that was labeled AMIKEY (the original was an AMIKEY 2). Pressumably the misplacement of this chip must have fried it when I first powered it one and it gave the vcc to the wrong pins, oh well. After this I also found 3 more chips badly misplaced (2 cache chips and 1 that I don't know what it is), with broken pins (maybe ever short-circuiting). I recconected everything but I still feel puzzled about the reason they were like this.
Now only problem is that I can't get the onboard IDE controller to work. At first it could recognise HDDs but the OS could never see them. Eventually it doesn't recognize anything and gives a hard disk controller failure error. Temporarily I have it working with a 16-bit ISA controller card.

Re: Need MS-5108 BIOS

Posted: Sun May 24, 2020 2:21 am
by orion24
And some pics

Re: Need MS-5108 BIOS

Posted: Sun May 24, 2020 6:42 pm
by edwin
This is fantastic! I'm not sure what harddisks you tried to run on this thing, they might be too big or unformatted or whatever. It is possible the IDE controller was fried somewhat because of the misplacement of the chips here and there.

One big question though, could you please send the bios to either elhvb AT outlook.com or to edwin AT elhvb.com please? I then can publish it on elhvb.com
As we already found out, it's nowhere to be found on the internet.