athlon-power wrote on 2020-07-25, 02:33:

If this post is a little short, or vague, I'm very irritated right now. I've been looking online for this for hours now, to no a […]
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If this post is a little short, or vague, I'm very irritated right now. I've been looking online for this for hours now, to no avail.

The one BIOS I can find for this board is broken- it's usually paired with the description of:

"2MB BIOS only! Allows hard drives up to 65GB and fixes exclamation point in Windows ME"

Or something like that. This BIOS is broken. various visual bugs pop up in the BIOS setup itself, characters where they aren't supposed to be, etc. I know my motherboard is a 2MB because I googled the flash chip itself and various datasheets mentioned that it was a 2MB chip. Somehow, some way, I got a 2MB chip, with a 1998 BIOS that does not properly support Pentium III CPU's. I've been told before that it shouldn't matter, but it will lock up during Windows 98 (FE and SE, OEM and Retail) setup, at the point where it says "Setup is preparing the Windows 98 Setup Wizard," every time, whether I try to install from the hard drive, or the CD drive. I have burned multiple new Windows 98 discs, so it isn't a bad CD, and the computer works perfectly aside from crashing at Windows 98 setup at that particular point. I ran MemTest86+, and it reported the RAM to be fine, booting from Hiren's Boot CD 15.2. The DVD-ROM drive I'm using in it is known good.

Windows 98 setup does not crash with the broken BIOS, telling me that it is indeed a problem with the BIOS. I'm not sure if it's just a bug, or if it's because I'm using a Pentium III, but either way, I can't find any other BIOS files for this thing and it's really starting to piss me off. I've spent hours digging through sketchy websites, and they either require me to make an account, download some sort of trojan, or just pull up 404's when I actually try to download the BIOS. I am so pissed that I paid US$70 for a motherboard that apparently wasn't produced inside of the fucking solar system, and that I can't find any updates or support or anything for. No, I'm not going to lose 100MHz worth of performance by downgrading to a stupid Pentium II 400, this is complete and utter garbage.

Why is the only available file the stupid broken version? Where are all the other versions? They're all behind trojan "Driver Downloader," downloads, 404's, and account creations on websites I have to translate to English because the websites themselves are in fucking Korean, or Japanese, or Chinese, or whatever, shit my ignorant, uneducated American ass can't read, and it's driving me absolutely insane. The solution is right there, and I can't get to it because apparently, this motherboard wasn't produced aside from 10 prototype models which were distributed across the ether. I am so, so, so frustrated right now, so sorry for the bad attitude.

The BIOS I found is from here . https://web.archive.org/web/20030510130828/ht … _cate=07_fae_03

EDIT: Manual is here . https://www.elhvb.com/mobokive/archive/epox/m … uals/61bxam.pdf

EDIT2 : See also https://web.archive.org/web/20001007033327/ht … rd/bios/bxc.htm for older BIOS file names .
EDIT3: Which you can find here : https://www.infania.net/misc/moboarchive/Epox … bios/index.html
EDIT4: Added the most recent ones to this post, for your convenience .

Filename: BIOS Date: Size: BIN Checksum:

bxc00726.exe 07/26/2000 227 KB n/a

Fixed Celeron 66.6 x9 is recognized as Pentium III CPU issue. Fixed
Intel 566 MHz cpu is recognized as 567Mhz issue.

* Actual CPU support varies for models. Check website Knowledge Base
for your model to see what processors are supported.

bxc00608.exe 06/08/2000 227 KB n/a

Fixed BIOS descriptions for Intel CPU 667 and 600MHz.*

* Actual CPU support varies for models. Check website Knowledge Base
for your model to see what processors are supported.

bxc00306.exe 03/06/2000 224 KB n/a

2MB BIOS chips only!
Added 36GB or larger HDDs support.
ACPI is updated to 1.0B.
Fixed 15GB HDD recognition issues.

bxc09c16.exe 12/16/1999 224 KB D573 H

2MB BIOS chips only!
Released the menu item for modem ring wake up in the CMOS.

Thank you.

I genuinely cannot express how much this helps. I don't even know how you did this, to be honest, but seriously, thank you. This must have taken ages to get together. I'm probably going to... censor my original post, I was pretty mad when I wrote it. Again, thank you, hopefully I can finally get this going, I am very grateful for this.

athlon-power wrote on 2020-07-25, 04:44:

Thank you.

I genuinely cannot express how much this helps. I don't even know how you did this, to be honest, but seriously, thank you. This must have taken ages to get together. I'm probably going to... censor my original post, I was pretty mad when I wrote it. Again, thank you, hopefully I can finally get this going, I am very grateful for this.

I'm happy to help and I do understand your frustration. There is so much crap on the Internet . That said, my "trick" is to try to find the original manufacturer's website(s) and use it/them to find BIOS/driver filenames on the Internet Archive . Once I have those, I run them through google (assuming the Internet Archive does not have them). That usually works pretty well .

Best of luck and let us know how it goes or if you need anything else .

Cheers!

So far, so good! No bugs, I decided to use the 07/16/1999 BIOS that introduced the PIII Microcode stuff in the first place and it seems to be going well. Also, I just went with searching the motherboard name and all that, probably isn't the best way of doing it 🤣. It seriously seemed like it was a very sparsely supported/rare motherboard, which is why I was talking about it not being made in this solar system and such. I run into this very often, especially with drivers for little-known/unusual hardware, it drives me absolutely insane. It's one of the few things in vintage computing that honestly sets me off.

athlon-power wrote on 2020-07-25, 05:19:

So far, so good! No bugs, I decided to use the 07/16/1999 BIOS that introduced the PIII Microcode stuff in the first place and it seems to be going well. Also, I just went with searching the motherboard name and all that, probably isn't the best way of doing it 🤣. It seriously seemed like it was a very sparsely supported/rare motherboard, which is why I was talking about it not being made in this solar system and such. I run into this very often, especially with drivers for little-known/unusual hardware, it drives me absolutely insane. It's one of the few things in vintage computing that honestly sets me off.

Sounds like a good candidate for a Vogons BIOS repository. Only a very, very tiny number of people care about things like this. I just used Jan Steunebrink's BIOS repository again a few weeks ago, and I would have been upset if it had been taken down - it's really surprising that it has remained up all of these years.