BIOS Updates forum

Why are ISA VGA cards required to use the bootblock on a failed flash?

I realise this is what the bootblock is programmed to support, but this seems an outdated approach when ISA is so old that new boards often do not provide ISA ports.

Do BIOS bootblocks on new boards support PCI VGA?

Can BIOSs be legally patched or updated to support the use of PCI VGA with the bootblock BIOS?

And taking this further, what about AGP VGA? I would have thought the BIOS should be able to extract the basic VGA functions out of any VGA card or VGA chip (on-board) so that a bootblock BIOS will give a display to work with.

How many boards with corrupt BIOSs are thrown out just because the user does not get a display and thinks the board is useless, when it may be recoverable with a bootblock BIOS, if the user had known that they coluld have a display?

My mainboard was manufactured in 2001 yet, but the bios bootblock supports PCI VGA (Award BIOS v6PG). Makes me think that award version 6 bioses support pci vga, but only when bootblock is executed.

But my frustration is that the programmers of this bios version did not include a feature for disabling onboard vga in bios setup under normal conditions, esp. for jumperless motherboards like mine. And the PCI VGA Card is not even initialized upon boot up, and the system just hangs.

Unfortunately some board manufacturers deliberately designed some boards with on-board VGA in such a way so that the on-board VGA could not be disabled, so that you would not be able to use an add-on VGA card. For this reason those boards probably generally do not have an AGP port, because they are not expecting you to make use of it. This way, if you want a better video chip, you have to buy another board AND video card or another board containing better on-board video, hopefully from them.

In the meantime, I hope that boards restricted to the use of on-board video will allow their on-board video to also be used with bootblock BIOS.

more on this later guys . I've successfully disassembled and understand the majority of the bootblock code . Btw, what ruelnov said, seems to be right (not so sure yet, haven't finished with award version 6.0 bioses). The surprising thing is that boot block seems to be supporting boot from CD rom, I'll try to verify this later.

The Boot Block BIOS of an AMIBIOS 8 based firmware solution can even support reflashing of the System Block by serial port and HD*.
*if the feature is enabled by the mainboard manufacturer ofcourse.