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Cpu steppings in bios

Posted: Sun Dec 15, 2002 1:53 am
by DanceMan
I have an Acer V66XA board with an Acer/IBM bios. This is a PII i440BX board that Acer and IBM sold only with PII 350/400/450 cpus. Acer put no other steppings into the initial part of the bios. The board will boot, then stop when it sees a different PII cpu, until you press <enter> to continue. It will then continue to boot and operate properly. Acer Europe has a batch file for the steppings on their website. Its origin may be Intel.
Does anyone know how this could be run to get this into the bios, or into the boot block?
Would one edit the bios file with this and then flash the bios with the edited file? (I have next to no DOS expertise, beyond fdisk and format.)

Posted: Sun Dec 15, 2002 7:53 am
by ajzchips
I remember solving that problem on that board with the PEP15.PDB utility. Do a search with google.com and you'll find very interesting stuff.
It will eliminate the "CPU Mismatch" error you're complaining about.

Posted: Sun Dec 15, 2002 12:23 pm
by DanceMan
Thanks ajzchips. Any chance that an equivalent exists for AMD cpus -- for the K6 II 500 in an Acer V70MA board, for example. This board has the same problem.

Posted: Sun Dec 15, 2002 5:52 pm
by ajzchips
For AMD cpus all I know is that it can be manually patched, but I've never attempted it on my own.

Posted: Mon Dec 16, 2002 1:33 am
by DanceMan
Thanks, ajz. I think before I go that route I'll try a non-Acer bios if I can scare up a spare bios chip, and find a similar board's bios.