First post, by devius
- Rank
- Oldbie
I recently aquired a DFI P5BV3+ Rev. B4 motherboard and I'm having a difficult time making it work. The CPU that came with it is a K6-2 350 and I got it with 2 sticks of 128MB PC133 SDRAM, and at first I had problems with memory compatibility. When powering on the system there would be a continuous beep with very short periodic interruptions. According to the manual this means there is some problem with the RAM and that I should try setting a jumper (JP4) that alters the RAM clock to be the same as the AGP clock (which is 66MHz). Now, when I set it this way the FSB and RAM clocks were 100/66MHz respectively. After this change the system would not boot and would not produce any beeps any more, no matter how many times I tried clearing the CMOS.
After doing some research I found a discussion where a guy said that DFI motherboards could easily get a corrupted BIOS by using any FSB/RAM ratio other than 1:1 😕 Although this discussion was about newer boards, it seems the same also applies to older ones as I have painfully discovered. 😢
I'm pretty sure the BIOS is dead because when I power on the system all the keyboard lights are on and they stay on until I turn the system off. I don't think the board itself is dead because using an ATX PSU I can turn the system on and off by shorting the two power switch pins.
From what I've been reading it should be possible to recover this BIOS chip by hot flashing it. However until yesterday, when I was looking for solutions to this problem, I never even heard of this process. I have flashed a lot of BIOS over the years, so I'm not that scared of doing it, however I don't currently have any other working socket 7 motherboard that I can use for the hot flash process. I do have two 486 motherboards which may do the job, a Chaintech 486SPM and an Epox VLB board that I can't identify. However, these are 486 boards, not socket 7 so I don't know if there will be any problems in regards to putting a more recent flash rom chip in there. Does anybody have any idea about this?