BIOS Updates forum

I am building terminal clients from old PC's(P166, award bios v4.51PG on all of them, only different mobos[some got replaced by warranty], other components same). The machines have a NE2k nic and I am trying to add etherboot into bios to elliminate any hard disk/floppy disk/cd drives. On one machine, I managed to get this working:
* removed unneccecary components with cbrom215 to make room for etherboot
* added etherboot to bios (/isa, c800:0)
* enabled with modbin video rom options (for the bios to search rom-s)
* flashed the bios
" configured the net adapter to io 300, irq3; disabled boot rom socket from net adapter (otherwise it overwrited the rom from bios)
But on other machines it does not work anyhow. I tried to replace all the hardware, but still nothing. It even does not extract the added isa rom to memory.
So, the question is: Does Award limit (compile time?) some bios modular functionality for some vendors, so that with some biosses it is not possible to add additional rom modules? (they get added by cbrom but not extracted/excecuted). Some sites say, that it does. Any suggestions to circumvent this issue? What about trying to use a bios program from a motherboard of same chipset?

Does all machines have the same VGA cards? IIRC, some VGA BIOSes are larger, using not only C000-C7FF, but C000-CFFF region. Try changing the base address to D000.

tried also d000:0, still no success. All the machines have same vga cards (mach2), but i tried also different ones. Still it seems, that the machine even does not copy rom to memory; i checked with debug, that the area i'm trying to load rom to is completely empty (filled with FF's).

Is it not possible, that the bios isn't even trying to load the extension roms?

MB is QDI Xplorer IV, bios is available at http://www.qdigrp.com/qdisite/eng/suppo ... r%20IV.htm

I ain't sure though, but it seems that some award bios doesn't properly initialize ISA roms. I have an article regarding expansion rom here and here (section Preliminary Award Bios Modification Guide). I hope that would help you

Maybe use PCI ROM image instead (use PCI ID of some PCI device in the system).

Rainbow wrote:Maybe use PCI ROM image instead (use PCI ID of some PCI device in the system).

can be problematic though . Some (I guess most) system bios check the PCI ROM against the existence of the corresponding device in the mainboard/add-in card slot and the corresponding PCI device must implement XROMBAR(expansion rom base address register) for this to function. But still, I think worth trying