Got bored last night. Decided to try and kill my OEM Gateway D865GLC motherboard.
I been tryin to flash the damn thing to the retail Intel bios for weeks without success until last night.
As you know, Intel's flash utility checks the BIOS strings for manufacturer ID, and if they don't match, you don't flash, even if you attempt it in recovery mode.
So just for craps and giggles I took the latest Intel BIOS and put it on a floppy disk and renamed it to the current installed Gateway bios .BIO file. Then I set the jumper to maintenance mode and set the BIOS to scan for user bins. Then I took an old no-name PCI NIC and slapped my old KX7-333R motherboard BIOS in the boot rom socket and slapped it in my puter with the logic that well maybe I can confuse it.
Well after removing the jumper so it would flash directly from a floppy in recovery mode, lo and behold the thing actually flashed to the retail BIOS!
The icky-poo 15A vendor identifier is gone and replaced with a lovely 86A.
Gateway can officially kiss my
AFAIK, I am the only person to have achieved this method on this particular chipset without editing the bios strings.
I now have all the hidden settings that normally ship with the retail board enabled! While not useful for overclocking, at least I can set my AGP aperture and memory timings so it does not default to the crappy 320mhz whenever I put double sided DIMMS in it.
Everything seems stable and runs fairly decent. I did have to phone into Micro$oft though because my LAN drivers had to be installed before I could get on the net.
However there are two quirks that I just don't get... first the CPU fan runs wide open and second the little red LED light that normally flashes when there is trouble is now constantly lit. BIOS error log is clean, and CPUID pulls up the correct info on all the components.
Also, on another note, I found the cheapest P4 heatsinks ever. Turns out the DELL poweredge 6 heatpipe tower coolers will fit in the OEM Gateway "swing bar" retention bracket. Cheapest I have seen is around $7 including shipping... they are MASSIVE. I'm thinkin that with one of these puppies installed I could possibly keep my Prescott in spec with nothing more than the case fan blowing over it.
I been tryin to flash the damn thing to the retail Intel bios for weeks without success until last night.
As you know, Intel's flash utility checks the BIOS strings for manufacturer ID, and if they don't match, you don't flash, even if you attempt it in recovery mode.
So just for craps and giggles I took the latest Intel BIOS and put it on a floppy disk and renamed it to the current installed Gateway bios .BIO file. Then I set the jumper to maintenance mode and set the BIOS to scan for user bins. Then I took an old no-name PCI NIC and slapped my old KX7-333R motherboard BIOS in the boot rom socket and slapped it in my puter with the logic that well maybe I can confuse it.
Well after removing the jumper so it would flash directly from a floppy in recovery mode, lo and behold the thing actually flashed to the retail BIOS!
The icky-poo 15A vendor identifier is gone and replaced with a lovely 86A. Gateway can officially kiss my
AFAIK, I am the only person to have achieved this method on this particular chipset without editing the bios strings.
I now have all the hidden settings that normally ship with the retail board enabled! While not useful for overclocking, at least I can set my AGP aperture and memory timings so it does not default to the crappy 320mhz whenever I put double sided DIMMS in it.
Everything seems stable and runs fairly decent. I did have to phone into Micro$oft though because my LAN drivers had to be installed before I could get on the net.
However there are two quirks that I just don't get... first the CPU fan runs wide open and second the little red LED light that normally flashes when there is trouble is now constantly lit. BIOS error log is clean, and CPUID pulls up the correct info on all the components.
Also, on another note, I found the cheapest P4 heatsinks ever. Turns out the DELL poweredge 6 heatpipe tower coolers will fit in the OEM Gateway "swing bar" retention bracket. Cheapest I have seen is around $7 including shipping... they are MASSIVE. I'm thinkin that with one of these puppies installed I could possibly keep my Prescott in spec with nothing more than the case fan blowing over it.
I used to have a nice collection of Phoenix and AMI BIOS editing programs that were useful to hack BIOS modules. Check out this site : 
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