486DX4 BIOS upgrade ...

[rdlebreton]

I am trying to resurrect an old 486DX4 system that came with some
perks (video card, 32MB ram, modem, sound card, etc.) but, alas, no
hard drive ... Hey, it was free! That didn't bother me so much
because I have a couple of old hard drives kicking around. One is 7GB
while the other is 8GB (both by Maxtor and under the 8.4 GB barrier).

I have identified the MoBo to be a Gigabyte GA-486AM/S (UMC
chipset) with Award BIOS 4.50PG dated 06/22/95. As some of you
experienced user can tell I ran into a little snag trying to set up
these hard drives. I have downloaded an overlay program from the
Maxtor website (i.e. MaxBlast 3.6) in preparation for their setup but
they are not even detected by the BIOS. Manually setting the
parameters doesn't help.

I believe my only recourse it to attempt to upgrade the BIOS on
this system to the last update put out by Award / Gigabyte put out for
this system. This system has the UMC 8881E/8886B Chipset and has
"2A4X5G0HC-00" as the BIOS ID.

Does anyone know anywhere I can get the image of a BIOS to upgrade
my system so I could use these hard drives on my system? Any comments
or suggestions are welcome.

TIA

 

[MCheu]

I am trying to resurrect an old 486DX4 system that came with some
perks (video card, 32MB ram, modem, sound card, etc.) but, alas, no
hard drive ... Hey, it was free! That didn't bother me so much
because I have a couple of old hard drives kicking around. One is 7GB
while the other is 8GB (both by Maxtor and under the 8.4 GB barrier).

I have identified the MoBo to be a Gigabyte GA-486AM/S (UMC
chipset) with Award BIOS 4.50PG dated 06/22/95. As some of you
experienced user can tell I ran into a little snag trying to set up
these hard drives. I have downloaded an overlay program from the
Maxtor website (i.e. MaxBlast 3.6) in preparation for their setup but
they are not even detected by the BIOS. Manually setting the
parameters doesn't help.

I believe my only recourse it to attempt to upgrade the BIOS on
this system to the last update put out by Award / Gigabyte put out for
this system. This system has the UMC 8881E/8886B Chipset and has
"2A4X5G0HC-00" as the BIOS ID.

Does anyone know anywhere I can get the image of a BIOS to upgrade
my system so I could use these hard drives on my system? Any comments
or suggestions are welcome.

TIA

I guess you can't grab it from the Gigabyte site, unless they still
have an FTP site up and have their older files on it. Their website
support only goes back as far as Socket7 CPUs.

If you can't find a BIOS update, however, you can get around it, by
buying yourself an add-in controller board and disabling the one built
into the motherboard (see the manual. Most of these old boards
involve pulling a jumper someplace for this). The issue here, is
whether this motherboard has PCI slots or not, since it's going to be
pretty difficult to locate such a beast with modern hard drive support
in ISA or VLB.

 

[Stacey]

One good thing about this board is that it *does* have PCI slots.

One problem you may run into, are these "bus mastering" PCI slots? Might be
easier to find an old 1.X gig drive to try?