BIOS Updates forum

Have an Acer M70VA board with an IBM bios (K6II, ALi chipset.) The IBM bios upgrade is an executable file that builds a flash diskette. I wanted to flash the board with an Acer bios that appeared to be much later. I was not able to do it with the Acer flasher and bios, or the IBM diskette with the Acer bios substituted. I eventually deleted the IBM bios from the diskette, substituted the Acer bios and renamed it with the same name as the IBM. It autoran and completed, but the bios is the same; only the date appears different by a few days.
I've tried looking in the bios with Wordpad, but it's difficult to tell much from that. Is there a better way to look into each bios file (for this non-DOS, non-programmer) to see if they are indeed the same?
The board still boots with the IBM splash screen. I assume that is because the boot block is unchanged.
If I could find a non-Acer board with the same chpset and onboard ATi video, I'd try flashing that. But for safety I'd do it on another chip and I don't have another one with a boot block that will boot this chipset. Is there a way to flash the boot block also -- copying the bootblock from the original Acer bios chip, then flashing both the original bootblock and the new bios to the second chip?

You have a board made for IBM. So, IBM logo is flashed if you use the IBM flash utility.

Thanks, Edwin. I really don't care about the IBM logo. I'm trying to either get a half-decent bios like Award or AMI into this board to have it recognize my k6II 500 without having to press a key in the middle of the boot and to get some control of the memory timings -- a very long shot for a board with onboard video -- or to edit the Acer/IBM bios so it recognizes the K6II 500 in the initial portion of the boot.

You could try and use uniflash, but you would be doing so at your own risk. A link to uniflash can be found here:

http://www.pppr.sk/rainbow/hardware/hotflash.html