Armitage64 wrote on 2025-08-18, 17:19:

RyanH-Nostalgia wrote on 2025-08-18, 16:15:

The FSH.EXE program did not work? How I always did it if I wanted to save a .BIN file of a BIOS is that I selected the 'Save Flash BIOS' option (as shown in this picture here that I took) and would save it as something like 'A:\BIOS.BIN' and if anyone had a Gateway 2000 that already had a Micro Firmware BIOS already installed on their system, the BIOS could be saved that way. Did you try and do it that way and did it just fail? I really hope that you did not lose any data on your hard drive, did the boot sector get corrupted on just the floppy disk that you used? I really hope that your hard drive is ok and that you are still able to boot from it. I personally only use Floppy Disks to save BIOS .BIN files to, I make a Boot Disk, then copy the FSH.EXE program to there and then boot from the disk and go from there.

Correct, the program locks up on the initial screen where you should be able to press Enter to continue or ESC to quit. I can't get past that screen as the machine becomes totally locked up. When running the program from a boot floppy, the drive access light stays on even once the program is loaded further indicating a crashed state. I also tried completely disabling the on-board IDE controller and turning off large disk support in BIOS as well as booting from an older DOS 5.0 floppy just in case the program wasn't happy with Win95's DOS 7.1. I'm open to other ideas to try 😁

Hmm, I have no idea why that even is. the 'FSH.EXE' should be able to save a BIOS of any version that there is as the 'FSH.EXE' Utility programs were made for those Micronics motherboards. I also notice that since you and I have different Micronics motherboards that were made different years, mine was made in 1993 (Gemini VL-BUS 09-00144-xx) and yours was made in 1994 (JX30G VL-BUS 09-00189-xx) as far as I know from what I have researched and there were more versions of the 'FSH.EXE' utility and since I have an older Micronics motherboard in my Gateway 2000 and since you have a newer one, I think maybe these newer 'FSH.EXE' utilities were made for them, I have found 3 newer versions on theretroweb when I was experimenting with other BIOS files that were made for these different Micronics motherboards and they were included with them, I think maybe the one I provided you was too old of a version but I do not know for sure. I have provided 3 more of these utilities. The same results may still occur but give them a try and see if any of them work. Be sure and run them from a Floppy Disk and not on your hard drive so that in case of a fail, no hard drive data loss will likely occur.

Thanks for posting the other versions of the program. I will give them a try but I am away from the computer for the next week so I will pick this up when I get back.

Armitage64 wrote on 2025-08-22, 11:27:

Thanks for posting the other versions of the program. I will give them a try but I am away from the computer for the next week so I will pick this up when I get back.

Not a problem, there is no rush, Take your time.

I tried all three of the versions you posted, booting from a clean floppy disk with HDD, BIOS shadow, etc. disabled. Only the FSH20.EXE made it all the way to identifying the Flash chip on my board, but even that locked up the machine before I could press ESC or Enter 🙁

Armitage64 wrote on 2025-08-30, 17:35:

I tried all three of the versions you posted, booting from a clean floppy disk with HDD, BIOS shadow, etc. disabled. Only the FSH20.EXE made it all the way to identifying the Flash chip on my board, but even that locked up the machine before I could press ESC or Enter 🙁

Hmm, I am not even sure why the 'FSH' Utility programs that were made for those Micronics Motherboards are not even working for saving a .BIN file of a Micro Firmware BIOS. I wonder if there is some sort of code in the Micro Firmware BIOS of some sort that is causing the lockups with the 'FSH' Utility programs. I just did a bit more research online for some other BIOS Extracting Utility software that is DOS Based and I did find this one,
I recently found this hardware, AKA the Dumpster find thread.

I ran 'ROMSAVAT.EXE' on my Gateway 2000 from a floppy disk just to test it and see if it would work and it saved it as a a file called 'ATROM'. Download the 'GETROM.ZIP' and put all the files within onto a floppy disk and just run the 'ROMSAVAT.EXE' program and it should create a 'ATROM' file and see if that works.

ROMSAVAT.EXE seems to have worked properly. Here is the file it created: