First post, by TheMobRules
A while ago I acquired an ASUS VL/I-486SV2G motherboard. I've seen a few threads here and judging by the comments it's a solid VLB board, in particular the VL/I-486SV2GX4 version which also supports lower voltage processors, with the possibility of "transforming" the SV2G into an SV2GX4 by adding a few components.
For now I'm fine running 5V processors on it, but when I tested my board I was disappointed to find out that the Award BIOS is not as feature-rich as the manual indicates, for instance:
- LBA support: according to the manual it should support up to 8GB hard drives, my board stops at the 500MB barrier
- Dual IDE channel support: the manual claims that by using a card with two IDE channels up to 4 IDE devices can be connected, however my board is only able to use the first channel of the controller card
This leads me to believe that the BIOS in my board is an older version (a DX4 overdrive is identified as "P24C" for example), so I suppose a BIOS update is required. I have a blank M27C512 ROM chip and an EPROM programmer, but since I haven't got a UV eraser at hand I want to make sure I program the correct BIOS version in order to avoid ending up with a useless chip until I get an eraser.
So, here are my questions:
1. My blank ROM chip is an ST M27C512 90ns, is that OK or do I need a faster one?
2. The latest versions of the BIOS are supposed to be applicable only to revisions 2.0 and 2.1 of the board. Mine is rev 1.8, however on this thread the OP uses the latest BIOS in a rev 1.7 board without issue. I assume the same may apply for rev 1.8?
3. As far as I can tell, the latest beta BIOS (0402.001) is the recommended one... has anyone experimented stability issues and had to go back to a previous non-beta version?
Thanks for your help!
