Award Bios

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Richard

Not sure if I had brought this up previously or not. DOn't think so.
Anyway to set bios settings on a headless machine with no KB/MS?
Anyone know of tools available to allow me to download my Bios and change
the Factory defaults? That way if a battery is changed, or a lightning
storm, our system will load the proper defaults.

Richard
 
Richard,

You are switching from easy questions to almost impossible questions.

I have no idea if this can be done with generic Award BIOS, but there are companies that make Custom BIOS-es and tools that you can
use to build your BIOS that satisfy your needs. Or you can contact someone to make you custom BIOS.

I think that these things probably cost allot:
http://www.esupport.com/oem/oempage.html

Regards,
Slobodan
 
If you have an Award BIOS, and its in FLASH, you may be in luck. Other
BIOSes are a different issue. The process is not without risk however.

There are several editors around. There is a suite of stuff that runs under
DOS (Awdflash, BIOSView, Cbrom and Modbin). It is vital to ensure that you
the right version of the tool for the version of BIOS that you are working
with - don't assume backwards compatibility. Most of these tool run OK with
Windows 9x, but most are flaky at best under Windows NT family.

I have seen (and used) a Windows one called Awdbedit. Its not perfect, but
works well on some BIOSes

Check out www.biosmods.com and sourceforge.net/projects/awdbedit/.

There is also a tool for building a video BIOS for C&T (Asiliant)
controllers. These are mostly history now, but similar tools may exist for
other controllers.

As an aside, if your Award BIOS will support it (and not all manufacturers
put it in), you can use these tools to put your own splash screen into the
BIOS. This completely circumvents the discussion of slpash screens from XPe.

To minimise risk I would verify that the BIOS that I propose to download
behaves both in CBROM and Awdbedit. As a backstop, I would try to work with
a motherboard that has its BIOS chip in a socket, and get a 2nd chip to work
with (access to an EPROM programmer needed).

HTH

Simon
 
Hi

We use the manufacture of our device(PC, computer, embedded device), to
generate af custom BIOS for us. It has not been a problem so far.

Thomas
 
The BIOS we use is from General Software http://www.gensw.com and is
intended as a PC-compatiible embedded BIOS and has useful features to that
end. One feature is to be able to setup the BIOS over the serial port.
 
Spoke to Advantech, and they say I can pay them to do it or use the same
utility they use to do it. Modbin6.

Thanks for all the input.
Richard
 
Advantech will charge $600 for each custom bios.
You simply set up your bios the way you want and take pictures of each
screens and then email them to your distributor He will then order the
custom bios.
You will be getting a bin file and a dos utility.
I made a dos bootable CF card that autoexecutes a dos command line to upload
the flash.
I then just boot the machine with the cf card in it and it will update the
flash.
Some advantech distributors (like Jaco and Apollo displays) can do this for
you for a fee.
Warning, the first custom bios file took me 4 weeks. Apollo is usually
faster.
 
They quoted me $500 & $10 per board, or I could do it myself with Modbin6.
This came from Advantech directly, that they use that utility.
 
Where did you get MODBIN6?
Richard said:
They quoted me $500 & $10 per board, or I could do it myself with Modbin6.
This came from Advantech directly, that they use that utility.
Click to expand...
 
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