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Updating bios on Gateway with different bios

offensive_Jerk

offensive_Jerk

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I have a Gateway 2000 P5-133 with a pentium 133mhz.
It appears to be an Intel board with a Intel 82430VX chipset.
The Gateway bios on there is a POS. Also, It has trouble booting every Linux distro from CD I have tried. They were all Debian based, though.

Has anyone ever heard of updating the bios to a non-OEM bios? Are there alternate bios' out there?
 
If the board is completely identical to a retail model, then it's sometimes possible to crossflash. Unfortunately that's rarely the case, usually the OEM versions of boards have some little feature changed or omitted. Gateway might be a little better about that, as I think they mostly used standard Micronics boards during that era.

However, OEMs often have protections in place where it won't let you flash some other random ROM image... you might end up having to pull the BIOS chip and flash it from another machine. Another possible issue is the capacity of the flash chip... sometimes the OEMs use a different size ROM, and you have to replace the physical BIOS chip with an appropriate capacity one before you can flash the new BIOS.
 
offensive_Jerk said:
I have a Gateway 2000 P5-133 with a pentium 133mhz.
It appears to be an Intel board with a Intel 82430VX chipset.
The Gateway bios on there is a POS. Also, It has trouble booting every Linux distro from CD I have tried. They were all Debian based, though.

Has anyone ever heard of updating the bios to a non-OEM bios? Are there alternate bios' out there?
Click to expand...

Did you tried smart boot manager to boot of your CDs? http://btmgr.sourceforge.net/download.html
 
Mr bios

Mr bios

Back in 1995, I had built a Pentium 100 system with an Intel Endeavor motherboard (rougly around the same generation as your system, perhaps slightly older). Since I wasn't too thrilled with the BIOS it came with either, I ended up flashing the motherboard with an alternative third-party BIOS called "MR BIOS" made by a company called "Microid Research".

This company wrote alternative BIOSes for an extensive range of Pentium motherboards and chipsets.

Perhaps your Gateway motherboard is among them.

I had good experiences with it. For one thing I remember the system booting up much faster with MR BIOS.

I found some MR BIOS images for various motherboards on this site:

http://www.whitebunny.net/hardware/microidresearch/bios.html

MR BIOS images were originally shareware, but these days they aren't sold anymore, and are considered abandonware. This of course does not imply in any way that these images are officially legal to use.

Flash your motherboard at your own risk! The usual disclaimers apply. :)

Hope this helps.
 
Last edited:
Hmmm...

Hmmm...

Browsing through that site I linked to, I notice that the site maintainer didn't manage to preserve or locate all MR BIOS images, since there don't seem to be any images for Intel branded motherboards.

And I know for a fact that there were MR BIOS images for Intel branded boards, because there was one for my Intel Endeavor board...

Perhaps you'll have to Google a bit more. Maybe you can find some more MR BIOS images elsewhere...
 
offensive_Jerk said:
I have a Gateway 2000 P5-133 with a pentium 133mhz.
It appears to be an Intel board with a Intel 82430VX chipset.
The Gateway bios on there is a POS. Also, It has trouble booting every Linux distro from CD I have tried. They were all Debian based, though.

Has anyone ever heard of updating the bios to a non-OEM bios? Are there alternate bios' out there?
Click to expand...

All you may need to do is to figure out which Intel motherboard (if actually from them) it is. A few years back I flashed a group of PII Intel motherboards to get a few of them even working. The Intel sequence was to have a floppy with the image and set a jumper over to flash it.
 
I was using a boot floppy, but the case it was in was missing the cover and such, so I put it in a modern case which does not have a floppy bay.

I am having a hard time trying to figure out which board it is. I don't like Intel's download page...
 
offensive_Jerk said:
...I am having a hard time trying to figure out which board it is. I don't like Intel's download page...
Click to expand...

You are better off searching by its Gateway identifier or markings on the motherboard. Are you sure it is an Intel motherboard (they are marked in particular ways)? Just an Intel chipset won´t do (although it can give indications of which motherboard it is from Intel & other vendors), any BIOS string displayed on boot?
 
I already checked on Gateway's site. Apparently, It already has the most current bios from them from the BIOS string displayed.

I am not sure it is an actual Intel board, but there are Intel markings all over it.
 
Actully, I was wrong, I don't have the latest bios. Will upgrade from Gateway.
I see the update includes improved CD booting.
 
That is indeed an Intel-made board, but unfortunately it's a custom job specifically for Gateway. It's fairly similar to the AN430TX and LT430TX, but with a slightly different layout, and from what I can find it apparently has a 128K flash chip rather than the 256K on the 'true' Intel boards. So, even if you wanted to risk crossflashing a BIOS from a similar board, you can't... it won't fit on your flash chip. You're pretty much stuck with the BIOS you have.
 
Old Thrashbarg said:
That is indeed an Intel-made board, but unfortunately it's a custom job specifically for Gateway. It's fairly similar to the AN430TX and LT430TX, but with a slightly different layout, and from what I can find it apparently has a 128K flash chip rather than the 256K on the 'true' Intel boards. So, even if you wanted to risk crossflashing a BIOS from a similar board, you can't... it won't fit on your flash chip. You're pretty much stuck with the BIOS you have.
Click to expand...

Darn. I did notice that strange flash chip though.
 
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