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Replace original bios

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KhanTyranitar

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Mar 15, 2018
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13
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Salt Lake City
I have a Bondwell b310 laptop that has a bad hard drive. It has a very limited set of configurations it supports and am trying to get a solution that would let me do a CF card instead.

So can I replace the bios with one that will be more versatile? I was thinking the XTIDE BIOS but don’t know if that will work. This laptop has the Award BIOS as HI and LO chips.
 
XT-IDE Universal BIOS is not a general purpose BIOS. It's an extension ROM intented to control your harddisk(s) only. You cannot replace your BIOS with it. What you need to do, if you can, is add an XT-IDE adapter card with the required ROM or see if your laptop has a socket for an additional ROM chip and burn it with XT-IDE Universal BIOS. Probably you will need to replace your BIOS with this one:

http://www.phatcode.net/downloads.php?id=101

since those additional BIOS sockets where intended to put BASIC ROMs that are mapped to Fxxx addresses and, usually, those addresses aren't scanned by BIOSes to find ROM extensions.
 
dieymir said:
XT-IDE Universal BIOS is not a general purpose BIOS. It's an extension ROM intented to control your harddisk(s) only. You cannot replace your BIOS with it. What you need to do, if you can, is add an XT-IDE adapter card with the required ROM or see if your laptop has a socket for an additional ROM chip and burn it with XT-IDE Universal BIOS. Probably you will need to replace your BIOS with this one:

http://www.phatcode.net/downloads.php?id=101

since those additional BIOS sockets where intended to put BASIC ROMs that are mapped to Fxxx addresses and, usually, those addresses aren't scanned by BIOSes to find ROM extensions.
Click to expand...

Ok. Thanks. That might work. I do not have any expansion options that I know of. No card slots. It has two BUOS chips which occupy both sockets. That TurboXT bios might be the ticket.
 
I should add, though I haven’t independently confirmed, that one source says this machine is technically an AT class instead of an XT. Would that make a difference?
 
So just providing an update, both in continuing to look for a solution and to let others know. At the moment I can boot of the hard disk that was original to the machine. But if I put in an IDE-CF adapter, none of the built in configurations work. If I set incorrect values on the hard disk and the boot from a floppy then I can access the C drive. If the configuration is reasonably close I can read and write. If the values are not close enough it encounters errors. The bios in this machine does not allow direct entry of the CHS values.

I tried the disk based XTIDE option and that doesn’t work. If I modify the file to use ATIDE.bin instead of XTIDE it works a little better, but hangs.

The computer has two bios chips 27C256 labels as BIOS LO and BIOS HI. I can try flashing another BIOS, but to be honest vintage PCs are not my area of expertise. I do like getting into them, and I like to learn, but this is not my area. So couple questions.

On this original BIOS, is it two memory ranges, each 32K in size, orl is it treated them both as a 32K 16 bit bios. Or is there some way to rig in an option ROM. For the record, when I run the XTIDECFG it detects a 16 bit IDE controller.

I just still want a way to get away from the original hard drive and run a CF card option instead.
 
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