First post, by Boohyaka
- Rank
- Oldbie
Hi, I have received a FIC PA-2010+ mobo. According to the PCB this is a rev 4.1 board.
The included BIOS chip seems to be an original Award bios chip, labelled 6.18J90Es. When booting, that's the version reported by POST, so looks OK.
But the HDD size is limited to 8GB so I start looking for updates BIOSes.
I visit fic's website on archive.org, and it seems each revision (4.0, 4.1, 4.2, 4.2A) have their own suite of different BIOSes. Screen at the bottom.
The 618J90E that I'm running isn't even there (under 4.0 only 617J90E is available) and other revisions have different naming conventions.
Having a 4.1 revision board, and luckily seeing the latest BIOS offered (113AB135) for that rev specifically mentions >8GB support for boards with VIA586A south bridge (yay! that's what I have), googling around I find that mirror of FIC's FTP (which also has the 618J90E i was initially running) so I download and try it. Computer boots fine, reports the correct version but...HDD autodetect hangs, and in any case I get a floppy error (C0)...bummer.
For the sake of it and having access to a TL866 programmer I download 6200J90E (in y2k folder), the readme says rev 4.0 bios but as it's the updated version of the one that worked fine, I flash a chip and try it...and everything works fine. But it's still limited to 8GB...double bummer.
It's weird that running BIOS for a rev4.0 while I have 4.1 are the ones working, and the specific BIOS for 4.1 doesn't work?
Are there any BIOS magicians around that have an idea?