First post, by GigAHerZ
- Rank
- Oldbie
Hi all!
I've aquired a QDI V4S471/G motherboard recently and resurrected it into life. The BIOS chip was toast as it had been on the board backwards.
Though, it's a curious case - i can read the chip and burn the rom on new chip, but the board doesn't boot up. I also tried other bioses from the internet for SIS 471 based boards. In the end, really, it has AMI and Award bioses and only Award boots up...
So one thing i would love to have is an original BIOS rom.
I've used so far other SIS 471 chipset based BIOS roms and they have worked beautifully so far. (And a bit of foreshadowning: it works well with 256kB of L2 cache)
So the next step was to upgrade the board from 256kB of L2 cache to 1024kB of cache. I have bunch of 1024kb chips so should work great. The board detects it, but when it comes to booting from hdd and i expect a message of "Starting MS-DOS...", it locks up. When i disable "External Cache", it boots up properly.
Based on documentation, the TAG chip should be 512kb instead of 1024kb. So i tried to bring the last address line of that chip to VCC through 10k resistor, but that didn't make the board work. I've ordered some 512kB chips, too, just to be sure, but it takes time to arrive.
Right now, I'm in the middle of messing around with the BIOS ROM on register 72, that contains bits of how some of the caching lines should work.
I'm doing all my testing with the slowest settings in BIOS and just 25MHz bus speed just to eliminate any speed issues. Later, when stuff works, i can tune it up.
But do you know anything that could help? What could i check?
"640K ought to be enough for anybody." - And i intend to get every last bit out of it even after loading every damn driver!