After long adventures blaming everything from HDD to next door's cat I now know I have an out of date BIOS and possibly even the wrong BIOS.
Trouble is... what have I got?
This is a 9 yr old Tiny and works on DSL altho not fast, have no trouble using ultimatebootcd or slackware installation as a live cd.
Stamped on the mainboard is MS6178 ver 1.1. I can't find that ver 1.1 anywhere.
ID string is 63-10b1-001169-00101111-071595-WHITNEY-1WHITNEY-H
I've ben looking in lots of places. Main one is
http://global.msi.com.tw/index.php?f...3&maincat_no=1
and also
and
http://support.asus.com/technicaldoc...Language=en-us
(that's good for advice on using the flash utility) and
http://www.wimsbios.com/faq.jsp is great for general BIOS stuff
That MS6178 wants an AWARD bios according to the website, latest 2.1, but I actually have AMI, v1.5. For the MS6183- I'm thinking the spec for the ver 1.1 may require the MS6183 bios??- latest is 1.7. There is also a MS6178E, but that has the same bios list AFAICT.
Checking against the ID string, it gets confusing. It's not listed where I checked
http://www.wimsbios.com/faq/determinebiosupdate.jsp , closest reference I have so far is in
http://www.wimsbios.com/phpBB2/topic8056.html.
2 questions really:
If anyone has experience with the BIOS flash tools... I tried the awdflash, in the "file name to program" I entered the name of the new BIOS, reply was "the program file's part number does not match with your system". I now know that I have to disable cache in BIOS & short across the lock terminals with jumper, adjacent to BIOS on mainboard. However it might be due to my identification problems. I think there's a way to override this but mainboards don't make very good ornaments...
And the main question- which BIOS should I try here?
(I have had loads of help on
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...392/page2.html
and that shows where I have started to look at BIOS issues, even considered corebios. Any comments on this will be most helpful.)
If I end up exploding my mainboard, it's not my main computer anyway. But these boxes (I have several) can be quite good so I'd prefer to salvage this one if at all possible.
Thanks guys.