Hello, I have a classic Abit BP6 SMI motherboard with an Award BIOS (BP6_RU.BIN). This board has ISA and PCI slots, and I have an Sil3114 PCI SATA controller (BIOS rev b5500.bin). The controller works fine in Windows, however, the PC will not boot from it, likely due to the BIOS not supporting booting from external PCI devices. After reading for a while, it would appear that it is possible to inject the Sil3114 BIOS into my Award BIOS (as a PCI module?), so that the system will recognise it and boot from it instead of the IDE/HPT built-in crontrollers. However, I am not sure how to actually achieve this or the tools to use. BIOS modding noob at play, clearly. Where would be a good place to read for examples on how to achieve this with older (year 2000) Award BIOSes? Thank you.
Thank you, @limurphy. After reading more about cbrom (not easy as most is in Russian, and even with Google Translate, it's hard to understand) I am seeing that the ideal scenario would be to remove an existing module from within the BIOS and inject what I'm interested in. Am I on the right track? There are things like trying to keep the size of the replacement module as close as possible to the original, and a few other things like the order of the modules matter, etc. Is this all correct? There are things like (for example) the use of LHA to compress a module, that I don't necessarilly understand. Is this I need to do myself, or does cbrom do it automatically when replacing a module? I have a TL866 EEPROM programmer, so I can always easily recover. I'm not afraid to try things myself, but would rather understand it all before giving it a go. Thanks.
Thanks mate. Yes, I've read about that as well so thanks for confirming it. This file you've attached: have you injected the module for me?
Ah, very kind of you - thanks. I will give it a go tomorrow and yes, I have the original and spare EEPROMS for it. Cheers.
Just a quick update: it flashed successfully and I was able to see the Sil3144 BIOS message (very, very briefly) while power cycling the system. It successfully detected my SATA SSD. I have not yet been able to boot from it, but I think that is an OS issue that I need to rectify. My next endeavour is to add a PXE BIOS (somehow) to see if I can PXE boot from my Intel E100 PCI NIC. The reason for this is because my Abit BP6 does not have a network boot option on it. I don't know if this is a hidden feature that may be enabled, using MODBIOS for example. Thank you so much again for your help.