I SOLVED IT!

i remeber that i used a different board and messed up something in the bios steetings after save settings and exiting to a soft-reboot the board and the fans were working but getting no post or beeps on my monitor, so i shut off the computer, took the cmos battery out waited 2-5 minutes put it back in to a complete system restore and everything was working. so realizing that, i took the OEM MS6199VA ver: 2 board out of the case, pulled the jumper out of the J3 pins that i soldered to the board (to disable BIOS write protection, since it's not written anywere in the manual, only the Retro web sites mentions this!), took the cmos battery for 5 min put it back and it did post and beep. then i tried uniflash 1.40 again same thing did not recognized the bios or anything, in the uniflash 1.4 documentation by Rainbow Software they did mention that some VIA boards will work and some don't. after reading very old dead end forms about flashing utility for older boards. i took a risk and used AWDFlash, made a boot floppy disk with AWDFlash ver 7.91 (read that versions 8 and up or only for post 2001 and onwards motherboards) with the BIN file, and it flashed my bios successfully!. in the bios setting in IDE HDD Auto Detection it's finally auto detecting the 80GB hard drive without freezing the computer, but had to reinstall Win98 SE due to dos partition, since it still see's 10gb HDD in C drive even after flashing the bios. after deleting and re-partitioning DOS, formatting c: when finally got to the windows screen it picked up almost 80GB. that's what i wanted to see!😁

vintageonthemoon wrote on 2025-04-13, 22:38:

I SOLVED IT!

i remeber that i used a different board and messed up something in the bios steetings after save settings and exiting to a soft-reboot the board and the fans were working but getting no post or beeps on my monitor, so i shut off the computer, took the cmos battery out waited 2-5 minutes put it back in to a complete system restore and everything was working. so realizing that, i took the OEM MS6199VA ver: 2 board out of the case, pulled the jumper out of the J3 pins that i soldered to the board (to disable BIOS write protection, since it's not written anywere in the manual, only the Retro web sites mentions this!), took the cmos battery for 5 min put it back and it did post and beep. then i tried uniflash 1.40 again same thing did not recognized the bios or anything, in the uniflash 1.4 documentation by Rainbow Software they did mention that some VIA boards will work and some don't. after reading very old dead end forms about flashing utility for older boards. i took a risk and used AWDFlash, made a boot floppy disk with AWDFlash ver 7.91 (read that versions 8 and up or only for post 2001 and onwards motherboards) with the BIN file, and it flashed my bios successfully!. in the bios setting in IDE HDD Auto Detection it's finally auto detecting the 80GB hard drive without freezing the computer, but had to reinstall Win98 SE due to dos partition, since it still see's 10gb HDD in C drive even after flashing the bios. after deleting and re-partitioning DOS, formatting c: when finally got to the windows screen it picked up almost 80GB. that's what i wanted to see!😁

I'm glad you solved it. I was going to advise you to try awdflash too, as it is the utility used for flashing the MSI (non OEM) board.

I also acquired an OEM (Compaq) MS-6199 v. 2 recently and fortunately it came flashed with the last BIOS (wimsbios with support for larger HDDs) and I hadn't to worry about this.

However I'm a bit disappointed about its performance : I do own another slot 1 Mobo, an Intel SE440BX-3 ("Seattle 3") which only supports 66 & 100 MHz FSB (not overclockable over 103 MHz). I ran some tests and, quite to my surprise, the Intel board running at 100/103 MHz was faster in terms of memory speed and graphics performance than the MSI board running at 133 MHz !! Obviously I tested both motherboards with the same video card (GeForce fx5200), hard drive controller and other PCI cards.

I advise use to install a PCI disk controller card, ie : promise Ultra 100 tx2 / Ultra 133 tx2; it improves disk access a lot over the integrated controller.

And please, read this thread at Vogons. There I discovered a couple (memory interleave and PCI latency) utilities from George Breese. Seems that most VIA chipsets came with both disabled or not fine tuned, causing poor performance. I have installed them both and the improvement is noticeable though not impressive over the "stock" behaviour of this MSI mobo.

I'm attaching some screen grabs from HWMONITOR32 and 3DMarks 2001SE comparing my intel SE440BX-3, 103 MHz FSB (PIII @ 850 Mhz) vs MSI-6199VA, 140 MHz FSB (PIII @ 1 GHz). Maybe you can use them as a reference for your system...

Greetings from Barcelona, Spain!

beltrixx wrote on 2025-04-17, 20:36:

I'm glad you solved it. I was going to advise you to try awdflash too, as it is the utility used for flashing the MSI (non OEM) […]
Show full quote

vintageonthemoon wrote on 2025-04-13, 22:38:

I SOLVED IT!

i remeber that i used a different board and messed up something in the bios steetings after save settings and exiting to a soft-reboot the board and the fans were working but getting no post or beeps on my monitor, so i shut off the computer, took the cmos battery out waited 2-5 minutes put it back in to a complete system restore and everything was working. so realizing that, i took the OEM MS6199VA ver: 2 board out of the case, pulled the jumper out of the J3 pins that i soldered to the board (to disable BIOS write protection, since it's not written anywere in the manual, only the Retro web sites mentions this!), took the cmos battery for 5 min put it back and it did post and beep. then i tried uniflash 1.40 again same thing did not recognized the bios or anything, in the uniflash 1.4 documentation by Rainbow Software they did mention that some VIA boards will work and some don't. after reading very old dead end forms about flashing utility for older boards. i took a risk and used AWDFlash, made a boot floppy disk with AWDFlash ver 7.91 (read that versions 8 and up or only for post 2001 and onwards motherboards) with the BIN file, and it flashed my bios successfully!. in the bios setting in IDE HDD Auto Detection it's finally auto detecting the 80GB hard drive without freezing the computer, but had to reinstall Win98 SE due to dos partition, since it still see's 10gb HDD in C drive even after flashing the bios. after deleting and re-partitioning DOS, formatting c: when finally got to the windows screen it picked up almost 80GB. that's what i wanted to see!😁

I'm glad you solved it. I was going to advise you to try awdflash too, as it is the utility used for flashing the MSI (non OEM) board.

I also acquired an OEM (Compaq) MS-6199 v. 2 recently and fortunately it came flashed with the last BIOS (wimsbios with support for larger HDDs) and I hadn't to worry about this.

However I'm a bit disappointed about its performance : I do own another slot 1 Mobo, an Intel SE440BX-3 ("Seattle 3") which only supports 66 & 100 MHz FSB (not overclockable over 103 MHz). I ran some tests and, quite to my surprise, the Intel board running at 100/103 MHz was faster in terms of memory speed and graphics performance than the MSI board running at 133 MHz !! Obviously I tested both motherboards with the same video card (GeForce fx5200), hard drive controller and other PCI cards.

I advise use to install a PCI disk controller card, ie : promise Ultra 100 tx2 / Ultra 133 tx2; it improves disk access a lot over the integrated controller.

And please, read this thread at Vogons. There I discovered a couple (memory interleave and PCI latency) utilities from George Breese. Seems that most VIA chipsets came with both disabled or not fine tuned, causing poor performance. I have installed them both and the improvement is noticeable though not impressive over the "stock" behaviour of this MSI mobo.

I'm attaching some screen grabs from HWMONITOR32 and 3DMarks 2001SE comparing my intel SE440BX-3, 103 MHz FSB (PIII @ 850 Mhz) vs MSI-6199VA, 140 MHz FSB (PIII @ 1 GHz). Maybe you can use them as a reference for your system...

Greetings from Barcelona, Spain!

i might look into getting PCI disk controller card Ultra 100 tx2 in the future, but i didn't noticed any real slowdowns or poor performance in my PC, the only time i got any slowdown is 3 seconds delay is when i open a folder within a folder, but when it comes to gaming it's perfectly fine, im using voodoo 3 3000 agp card (recapped, flashed the latest bios, and replaced the stock cooler with enzotech SLF-1 Ultra heatsink and fan), which is perfect for that board with VIA apollo pro 133 chipset, it's happy with agp 2x, but agp 4x can be a hit or miss. Almost everything in the bios is in stock setting aside from disabling resources that im not using.

Would Ultra 100 tx2 or Ultra 133 tx2 really improves performance in my mobo? the ms-6199VA ver:2 OEM? Because some sources says it actually slower in some areas and im using Seagate 80GB IDE hard drive 7200 RPM.

vintageonthemoon wrote on 2025-04-17, 22:27:

beltrixx wrote on 2025-04-17, 20:36:

I'm glad you solved it. I was going to advise you to try awdflash too, as it is the utility used for flashing the MSI (non OEM) […]
Show full quote

vintageonthemoon wrote on 2025-04-13, 22:38:

I SOLVED IT!

i remeber that i used a different board and messed up something in the bios steetings after save settings and exiting to a soft-reboot the board and the fans were working but getting no post or beeps on my monitor, so i shut off the computer, took the cmos battery out waited 2-5 minutes put it back in to a complete system restore and everything was working. so realizing that, i took the OEM MS6199VA ver: 2 board out of the case, pulled the jumper out of the J3 pins that i soldered to the board (to disable BIOS write protection, since it's not written anywere in the manual, only the Retro web sites mentions this!), took the cmos battery for 5 min put it back and it did post and beep. then i tried uniflash 1.40 again same thing did not recognized the bios or anything, in the uniflash 1.4 documentation by Rainbow Software they did mention that some VIA boards will work and some don't. after reading very old dead end forms about flashing utility for older boards. i took a risk and used AWDFlash, made a boot floppy disk with AWDFlash ver 7.91 (read that versions 8 and up or only for post 2001 and onwards motherboards) with the BIN file, and it flashed my bios successfully!. in the bios setting in IDE HDD Auto Detection it's finally auto detecting the 80GB hard drive without freezing the computer, but had to reinstall Win98 SE due to dos partition, since it still see's 10gb HDD in C drive even after flashing the bios. after deleting and re-partitioning DOS, formatting c: when finally got to the windows screen it picked up almost 80GB. that's what i wanted to see!😁

I'm glad you solved it. I was going to advise you to try awdflash too, as it is the utility used for flashing the MSI (non OEM) board.

I also acquired an OEM (Compaq) MS-6199 v. 2 recently and fortunately it came flashed with the last BIOS (wimsbios with support for larger HDDs) and I hadn't to worry about this.

However I'm a bit disappointed about its performance : I do own another slot 1 Mobo, an Intel SE440BX-3 ("Seattle 3") which only supports 66 & 100 MHz FSB (not overclockable over 103 MHz). I ran some tests and, quite to my surprise, the Intel board running at 100/103 MHz was faster in terms of memory speed and graphics performance than the MSI board running at 133 MHz !! Obviously I tested both motherboards with the same video card (GeForce fx5200), hard drive controller and other PCI cards.

I advise use to install a PCI disk controller card, ie : promise Ultra 100 tx2 / Ultra 133 tx2; it improves disk access a lot over the integrated controller.

And please, read this thread at Vogons. There I discovered a couple (memory interleave and PCI latency) utilities from George Breese. Seems that most VIA chipsets came with both disabled or not fine tuned, causing poor performance. I have installed them both and the improvement is noticeable though not impressive over the "stock" behaviour of this MSI mobo.

I'm attaching some screen grabs from HWMONITOR32 and 3DMarks 2001SE comparing my intel SE440BX-3, 103 MHz FSB (PIII @ 850 Mhz) vs MSI-6199VA, 140 MHz FSB (PIII @ 1 GHz). Maybe you can use them as a reference for your system...

Greetings from Barcelona, Spain!

i might look into getting PCI disk controller card Ultra 100 tx2 in the future, but i didn't noticed any real slowdowns or poor performance in my PC, the only time i got any slowdown is 3 seconds delay is when i open a folder within a folder, but when it comes to gaming it's perfectly fine, im using voodoo 3 3000 agp card (recapped, flashed the latest bios, and replaced the stock cooler with enzotech SLF-1 Ultra heatsink and fan), which is perfect for that board with VIA apollo pro 133 chipset, it's happy with agp 2x, but agp 4x can be a hit or miss. Almost everything in the bios is in stock setting aside from disabling resources that im not using.

Would Ultra 100 tx2 or Ultra 133 tx2 really improves performance in my mobo? the ms-6199VA ver:2 OEM? Because some sources says it actually slower in some areas and im using Seagate 80GB IDE hard drive 7200 RPM.

I installed WinXP SP3, which is more demanding than win98se. In my case, going from a stock disk read speed about 40 Mb/s to 80 Mb/s (Promise Ultra 100 TX2) was quite a boost, not only when loading the OS but also during normal use. I have two Seagate Barracuda drives, 7.2K RPM each, primary : 80 Gb, secondary : 120 Gb.

I have an Ultra 133 TX2 installed on a Super Socket 7 system and I'll probably swap it by the 100 TX2. I'm sure the MSI board will benefit from it way more than the super socket 7.

Regards,