First post, by xenium
I have a nice little Gateway Pentium 4 that I picked up a few years ago and have made into my Win98SE Retro gaming computer, for late DOS/early Windows gaming.
The machine uses an Intel D845HV motherboard.
The BIOS currently on the machine is quite old, version P03 (HV84510A.15A.0008.P03), and is Gateway branded. I have not been able to find an official Gateway upgrade for this BIOS. (Gateway seems to have scrubbed their website of any references to older hardware like this, and I'm having no luck finding later Gateway updates via the usual placed like the Wayback machine.)
The latest version of the BIOS I've found from Intel is version P15. (Intel has also removed all downloads for this board from their web site, but I was able to find copies of version P15 from other sources.)
I would like to upgrade from version P03 to version P15 so I can swap out the 1.5GHz CPU for a 2.6GHz CPU. Intel's documentation for this board says that this CPU is supported with the v15 BIOS.
The problem that I am running into is that Intel's iflash utility won't flash the "Intel" bios image onto a "Gateway" board, even though it's the same board.
I've found some old posts online where folks have gotten around this by editing the ID string in the BIOS header before flashing (changing 86A to 15A), but they state that they also had to update the BIOS checksums in order to get this to work (makes sense), and I have no idea how to do that, so I haven't tried it.
I've also found some old posts where folks have gotten around this by setting the motherboard jumper to recovery mode and then booting off the Intel recovery disk to re-flash the flash boot block. I have not had any luck doing this. The disk seems to boot, but I do not get the expected beeps and disk activity to indicate it's flashing, and after replacing the recovery jumper and restarting the system I'm still at the same Gateway BIOS.
I've read that for the recovery method to work one needs to have a "*.BBO" file containing the BIOS boot block on the disk. The Intel BIOS downloads don't include any such files, although they do contain a "bios.rec" file, which I think is probably the recovery boot block?
Someone else suggested a utility called UniFlash, which I found, but unfortunately it does not support this board.
Does anyone know what files I actually need, or how else I can flash this board?
