Thanks but are you sure that actuall has the manuals, BIOS, and drivers for all 250+ EOL motherboards ? Seems mighty small since I grabbed 1/2 the Manuals and BIOS only and it exceeds that amount. Ohh and no seeds on that torrent. A simple WGET will not grab things proper off Intel since they spread their file structure around.

Horun wrote:

Thanks but are you sure that actuall has the manuals, BIOS, and drivers for all 250+ EOL motherboards ? Seems mighty small since I grabbed 1/2 the Manuals and BIOS only and it exceeds that amount. Ohh and no seeds on that torrent. A simple WGET will not grab things proper off Intel since they spread their file structure around.

The attached text file lists what's being purged and present in the tarball. Given a typical driver might be tens of MBs in size, I would estimate 342 GB amounts to 10,000+ drivers.

Here's a direct link to the 342GB tarfile (recommend wget'ing or using a resuming downloader):
https://archive.org/download/downloadcenter.i … ept20th2019.tar

Yeah was hoping it was differant from the one I already DL'd which contained nothing of value. Did you read this thread ?
Intel to remove all BIOS updates on November 22nd, 2019 from their website

Horun wrote:

I already DL'd which contained nothing of value.

What should it contain to be of value? If it's missing content on the chopping block, then please share those details.

It has no manuals for any of the motherboards being removed, and some have as many a 5 diff manuals in .pdf (product guide, ref guide, technical product spec, spec updates, etc). It also is missing all the index files to relate which of the odd numbered and named files go to what chipset or motherboards. Yeah it has some usable files that can be deduced as to what they are for as long as Intel's website has the indexes (which will be removed). Once Intel wipes it all out one will have to open hundreds or more odd numbered folders and files to find something the are looking for if it is even in the archive (it has 10,000+ files in it). It is an archive of Downloadmirror.Intel.com and a lot of the stuff was moved to www.intel.com/content/dam/support/ a few years ago.

Horun wrote:

It has no manuals for any of the motherboards being removed, and some have as many a 5 diff manuals in .pdf (product guide, ref guide, technical product spec, spec updates, etc). It also is missing all the index files to relate which of the odd numbered and named files go to what chipset or motherboards. Yeah it has some usable files that can be deduced as to what they are for as long as Intel's website has the indexes (which will be removed). Once Intel wipes it all out one will have to open hundreds or more odd numbered folders and files to find something the are looking for if it is even in the archive (it has 10,000+ files in it). It is an archive of Downloadmirror.Intel.com and a lot of the stuff was moved to http://www.intel.com/content/dam/support/ a few years ago.

Thanks for the details Horun; I've passed your suggestion verbatim to the archive crew. Hopefully someone can/will progress it!

Really hate when companies do this. Why must they make it so difficult to use vintage hardware?

I get when a company goes out of business and their drivers disappear, but when you're a multibillion dollar giant, what's wrong with hosting maybe ~500GB to 1TB of old manuals and drivers in some dark, untouched corner of your website?

I totally agree FAMICOMASTER, they already stripped nearly all the BIOS files down to only the latest one for all the legacy boards and am sure that move saved them maybe a whopping 10Gb of space 😒

i hate when this happens
specially on old compaq pcs from the 90s

we have lost so many things, abit, epox, soyo

now intel

Pabloz wrote:

i hate when this happens specially on old compaq pcs from the 90s […]
Show full quote

i hate when this happens
specially on old compaq pcs from the 90s

we have lost so many things, abit, epox, soyo

now intel

HP hosts all the '90s Compaq Softpacs on their ftp site

Pabloz wrote:

i hate when this happens specially on old compaq pcs from the 90s […]
Show full quote

i hate when this happens
specially on old compaq pcs from the 90s

we have lost so many things, abit, epox, soyo

now intel

Note to Intel employees: this is how you alienate future customers. "Nahh.. people running EOL'd hardware aren't profitable, so we're cutting even the slightest carrying expense the moment the support phase lapses."

Counter-point is that these people you are leaving out to dry today might already be (or one day be) data center buyers, back-end developers, administrators, or managers. Competent companies today are listening to senior employee opinions more than in the past when a couple dinners was enough to close the deal.

Like cell phone buyers, companies today are more apt to keep running and self-supporting perfectly good big iron longer than the manufacture's desired upgrade treadmill dictates through EOL threats.