As promised I’m making a follow up about Abit NF7-S. Since its BIOS is missing boot from USB option I’m going to make that happen. A slightly longer than quick look on the internet reveals that I don’t have to modify the BIOS image myself, since there are quite a few ones available. One image in particular seems to meet my needs – BIOS modded by Infrared, it not only has PLOP boot manager built in, but also updated RAID BIOS image, proper recognition string for Athlon XP-Ms, different romsips and more.
What are romsips though?
“ROMSIP – a set of tables (CPU interface on/off, and for 100/133/166/200 FSB) with CPU and chipset related settings. Influence stability, overclocking, performance.” – https://community.hwbot.org/topic/208124-socket-462-bios-workshop/
Simply put romsips are optimizations, mostly for overclocking.
That’s it for theory, let’s start with practise.
I obviously started with dedusting, and changing the thermal paste on NB IC. At this point I discovered something… weird. My NB isn’t entirely flat, making the heatsink rock on it. This isn’t a big problem, but it may disqualify this board from extreme OC. Not that I’d do that, I like only ‘casual’ overclocking, so at this point I’ll just monitor the temperatures.
NB is prepped to go.
With that done lets proceed to the interesting part. For these older boards I like to use Uniflash V2.00. Usage is really easy – make a bootable pendrive with FreeDOS (I like to use Rufus for that), put on it the BIOS image and Uniflash, boot to DOS, fire up Uniflash, select “Flash BIOS image INCLUDING bootblock”, type BIOS file name aaand it’s done.
There is only one, tiny, problem.
This motherboard still can’t boot from usb. There is a solution though – let’s use a CD with PLOP burned on it. I have alredy prepped one on my other PC, so I won’t show this process now. There obviously are other ways, such as using floppies, hot-swapping or just using Windows flasher, but I find them harder than just using a “*tiny, plastic, spinny boi*”.
Ready to flash? Let’s go then!
And I have the first problem – I grabbed a very old drive, which has a deteriorated belt and the tray doesn’t wanna go out. Time for a swap.
“Second time’s the charm”, or so it went.
Don’t forget about the backup.
With flashed BIOS still everything works, but in order for PLOP to work I needed to mess a while with boot options, as it’s disabled by default.
And that’s it! Now this board is both more modern and faster, just as I like it :). Now I’m going to stress test the CPU and RAM using some good and old-school Hiren’s BootCD, and if it passes it’ll be ready for a great retro PC build.
Link to Infrareds BIOS: https://biosbude.de/%21%20BIOS%20VAULT/Abit/NF7-S%20v2.0/Infrared/
Link to Uniflash: https://soggi.org/motherboards/bios-update-flash-utilities.htm
Link to Rufus: https://rufus.ie/en/
Link to HBCD: https://www.hirensbootcd.org/hbcd-v152/
Thanks for reading!