Hello all. I've spent quite a bit of time this weekend trying to flash my aging Gateway 310 (Intel D845GVSR) mainboard with an improved Intel BIOS, all to no avail. It's become quite a challenge and I've learned quite a bit in the process. I've confirmed that a straight recovery flash from floppy isn't going to do it. It appears that Gateway in their infinite wisdom has employed some trickery that keep the Intel BIOS from passing checksum during the flash process. Several attempts at recovery flashing (removing the J9H2 jumper and booting from floppy) have been "ignored" by the board. From what I've been able to ascertain, the BIOS can be edited using the AMI tools, but first the header needs to be removed with Winhex before the AMI tools will recognize the BIOS.ROM. These tools report an error with size issues when I attempt to load the Gateway BIOS.ROM. So my question is, which hex values in WinHex need to be removed before the AMI tools will recognize the BIOS.ROM? For reference, here's the "header info" from the Gateway BIOS.ROM I've opened in WinHex: SR84511A P03 Zý ÿÿ System BIOS 06/10/04-13:54 FLA SH P03-0020.BI1 SR84511A.15A.0020.P03.0406101353 Likewise, here's what I have for the Intel BIOS.ROM I'm trying to flash the board with: VA84510A P07 Zý € ÿÿ System BIOS 06/30/03-21:46 FLASH P07 -0019.BI1 VA84510A.86A.0019.P07.0306302145 Disclaimer: If anyone feels I am baring up a very wrong tree, by all means let me know! I hoped that I might be able to edit the BIOS strings to trick the board into a recovery boot block overwrite, which would allow me to run the Intel BIOS. the Intel BIOS.ROMs look like they'll fit just fine on the 384K BIOS chip on the board. All I'm trying to do is to flash the Gateway to an Intel BIOS for additional CPU support. The Gateway BIOS is dated 6/04, which corresponds to the Intel P13 from Intel. Intel is now up to P20, and every revision since P13 has added additional CPU support, to include the Prescott w/ 1MB cache, several of which I have lying around collecting dust. BTW: A poster with the handle Yen mentioned that the header needed to be removed from Gateway BIOS before being accessible by the AMI tools. However, the link he provided was in Chinese, and even after translation, most of what that article describes isn't translated well enough to understand. Thanks! EDIT: The reason I posted in the Vista forum was due to all the BIOS-related discussion. My apologies for this, I'm simply casting where the fish are ;-)
I've got it to work with recovery (emachines t2893) If you are still interested (or still use this board) pls reply and I can upload the floppy disk image. (I flashed with p20) -- but lost the windows xp activation.., for some reason my bus speed is still at 400mhz and not 533mhz btw: don't bother editing the header strings, or flash with iflash or windows version. those intel apps checks so much security features that I tried to fix with softice(debugger) but end up not work at all.
I don't have the motherboard anymore. But when I was "experimenting", I had around 10? floppy disks, then the ones that didn't flash would sound like (low beep, low beep) and nothing was flashed. And the disk that flashed (with the intel bios..) successfully was (high beep, high beep). There's also a disk that can revert back to emachines bios. I could image all those "test" disk for you, but you have to see which one it was.