Tested all BIOS versions I could find and bottom line my v4.1 board only works with 4.0 BIOS. Doesn't make sense to me and sucks to be stuck at 8gb when there could/should be a solution 🙁

How large is really your current hdd ?

I tested with a 425MB WD Caviar IDE HDD, a Maxtor 200GB IDE HDD, and a 120GB SSD with a (working) CF-IDE adapter. All those work with the 4.0 rev BIOS.

In any case something else must be wrong, as even with no HDD installed and configured in BIOS, there's is no floppy seek at boot at all, and it fails with "Floppy disk(s) fail (C0)". Of course the exact same setup works fine with rev 4.0 BIOS 😒

Well the bios must be hanging because award bioses had a bug making them crash if the installed hdd was over 32GB. So now you don't have a 8GB limit but a 32GB limit. And also PCs made before 2003 can't work with HDDs larger than 128GB (and this is a hardware limit).

You may be capable of patching the latest bios to support larger HDDs up to 128GB but that's it.

I'm wondering if between the revs they didn't change the super io chip which would mean that with the latest bios, it doesn't have the right ""driver"" for super io meaning that floppy disks won't work, same for serial and parallel

Fair enough, I can live with the limit, I was just trying to get the max potential out of it. I didn't know bigger HDD's could make the BIOS hang, as I'm used to create a smaller partition in bigger drives and never had a problem with it so far.

About the super io comment, interesting but that still doesn't answer the main issue that doesn't make sense to me - my board is clearly a rev 4.1 board but only accepts 4.0 BIOS? And specific 4.1 BIOS for the specific south bridge that my MB has doesn't work? Can't find the logic in that 🙁

It's not the south bridge, it's the I/O chip.

Now I'll have a look at the BIOS on fic's FTP (could you please upload your bios here too) to check what they're made for so I can confirm or infirm my theory.

Sometimes even board manufacturers make mistakes, this could be one of them ^^

oh, I said south bridge because of this mention on the Soyo website about it "this beta BIOS is for VIA586A south bridge only"

Attaching two BIOS files:

6200J90E is the one meant for 4.0 and I'm successfully running
113AB135 is the one meant for 4.1 that I want to run but doesn't work

Board rev number and chip:

Thank you so much for looking into this!

Well it seems that your BIOS doesn't have the information I was looking for so I can't really say if my assumption was correct or not 🙁

Meanwhile, you can attempt to patch your bios using this tool for MS-DOS to improve HDD support ^^
http://www.win3x.org/win3board/viewtopic.php? … =188943#p188943

Oh merci!

Looks interesting 😀 I'll try later today.

Deksor wrote on 2020-10-15, 17:00:

Meanwhile, you can attempt to patch your bios using this tool for MS-DOS to improve HDD support ^^
http://www.win3x.org/win3board/viewtopic.php? … =188943#p188943

Is that Award specific, or for any BIOS? Added to my toolkit, but possibly needs moving to the right directory

To my knowledge it's award specific ...

Deksor wrote on 2020-10-15, 17:00:

Well it seems that your BIOS doesn't have the information I was looking for so I can't really say if my assumption was correct or not 🙁

Meanwhile, you can attempt to patch your bios using this tool for MS-DOS to improve HDD support ^^
http://www.win3x.org/win3board/viewtopic.php? … =188943#p188943

Hey man, thank you so much! 😁

So I patched the 4.1 rom file with the tool you provided, and now I'm able to detect drives up to 136GB, and it also fixed my floppy error as well? Awesome! So maybe it was linked to the award bug with bigger drives you were talking about?

Everything's looking good and I'm back in business working on that build 😉 really thanks a whole lot!