BIOS settings

[rond36]

Something strange happened today. It all started about a month ago when my system crashed in the middle of a BIOS flash and trashed the BIOS on my Soyo P4S Dragon Ultra motherboard. I ordered a new board and installed it(found out later I could have sent the chip back to Soyo to be re-flashed for $15 + postage http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/mad.gif ) and everything was fine but now have 2 of the same motherboard. Today I decided to see if I could fix the BIOS on the old board. I booted up using a DR-DOS boot floppy with the awdflash and .bin files on it. Removed the BIOS chip from the new board and replaced it with the chip from the old board and flashed it everything went fine, flash was successful. I shutdown and switched the chips back and booted to BIOS settup thinking that my BIOS settings would be lost when I removed the chip but to my surprise they were still there. This has me stumped how did the BIOS chip retain its settings when it was removed from the board. Are these setting stored somewhere else.

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How to Use the Fdisk Tool and the Format Tool to Partition or Repartition a Hard Disk (http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;q255867)
How to multi-boot Windows XP (http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/pro/using/howto/gettingstarted/multiboot.asp)
Microsoft Expert Zone Multi-booting made easy (http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/expertzone/columns/russel/september10.asp)
MSKB How to multi-boot Windows XP (http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;q306559)

[iisbob]

In the old days the CMOS and BIOS were two physically different chips, and the battery's main job was to prevent the loss of data in the CMOS since the BIOS is a ROM chip.

In modern boards, the BIOS chip incorperates the CMOS settings, it's commonly a EEPROM { electrically eraseable programable read only memory }-which simply means an electric charge has to be sent thru it for the settings to be changed, or " flashed " as it's commonly known.

Since all you did was physically remove the chip-without introducing any current to it-you didn't alter it's data.


Here are some nice links for your study:

BIOSdef (http://www.sysopt.com/biosdef.html)

BIOS & upgrading (http://www.upgradingandrepairingpcs.com/faqs/Bios/index1.asp)

BIOS & you (http://www.computorcompanion.com/LPMArticle.asp?ID=76)

Also take a look in Charles' site the PC Guide (http://www.pcguide.com)

http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/wink.gif

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iisbob

Computer-Show me the Enterprise; no bloody A, no bloody B, and no bloody C-just the original...Mr Scott { from a STNG episode }

[This message has been edited by iisbob (edited 05-05-2002).]