Hi all! New here. I have a GA-G31M-ES2L and GA-G41MT-ES2l motherboard. Whatever applies to G31M probably applies to G41MT as well, so this question will target the former motherboard. While booting I see this:
There are two things that prevent it from looking like the classic Award BIOS that I used to see as a kid - that dual bios logo and the long "Main Processor : " line eating into the energy star logo. It may seem silly, but due to nostalgia reasons I want to get rid of both these obstacles.
For the dual bios logo, I used CBROM 2.20 to extract /LOGO1. Then edited the image to look all black (by mistake, I left out a small “TM” bottom right portion of that image). Then I added it back to the bios image using CBROM 2.20 under the same file name (I used “CBROM orig.bin /LOGO1 dbios.bmp”).
For your reference, this is the original, unmodified BIOS listing:
CBROM V2.20 (C)Phoenix Technologies, Ltd 2001 All Rights Reserved.
******** ORIGBAK.BIN BIOS component ********
No. Item-Name Original-Size Compressed-Size Original-File-Name
================================================================================
0. System BIOS 20000h(128.00K) 1493Fh(82.31K) tt.BIN
1. XGROUP CODE 0E610h(57.52K) 0A279h(40.62K) awardext.rom
2. ACPI table 042D4h(16.71K) 0195Bh(6.34K) ACPITBL.BIN
3. EPA LOGO 0168Ch(5.64K) 0030Dh(0.76K) AwardBmp.bmp
4. GROUP ROM[18] 03560h(13.34K) 023F7h(8.99K) ggroup.bin
5. GROUP ROM[20] 028C0h(10.19K) 01E8Dh(7.64K) ffgroup.bin
6. YGROUP ROM 0C300h(48.75K) 06748h(25.82K) awardeyt.rom
7. GROUP ROM[22] 0F630h(61.55K) 006A9h(1.67K) tgroup.bin
8. GROUP ROM[23] 0F630h(61.55K) 0015Bh(0.34K) t1group.bin
9. GROUP ROM[24] 0F630h(61.55K) 0055Eh(1.34K) t2group.bin
10. GROUP ROM[ 0] 078C0h(30.19K) 02D5Ah(11.34K) _EN_CODE.BIN
11. VGA ROM[1] 0C000h(48.00K) 078C6h(30.19K) BLB_1471.DAT
12. Other(4069:0000) 07400h(29.00K) 07433h(29.05K) MEMINIT.BIN
13. PCI ROM[A] 0A800h(42.00K) 06479h(25.12K) AR8131.lom
14. LOGO1 ROM 00B64h(2.85K) 00520h(1.28K) dbios.bmp
15. Other(4067:0000) 022ADh(8.67K) 00BD6h(2.96K) PPMINIT.ROM
16. OEM0 CODE 03006h(12.01K) 022A6h(8.66K) SBF.BIN
Total compress code space = 66000h(408.00K)
Total compressed code size = 471B6h(284.43K)
Remain compress code space = 1EE4Ah(123.57K)
** Micro Code Information **
Update ID CPUID | Update ID CPUID | Update ID CPUID | Update ID CPUID
------------------+--------------------+--------------------+-------------------
SLOT1 0A 0F32|
When I flashed this image, the bootup was normal and the dual bios logo was replaced by all-black (except that small bit I’d missed out). This tells me the procedure was a complete success.
For the Main Processor line, I tried an identical approach:
- CBROM orig.bin /GROUP extract (and then save as _EN_CODE.BIN)
- Open en code with hex editor, and just try a simple edit first. In this case I replaced "Main Processor : " by "Main Professor : ", i.e. in the whole hex file I only edited one character and saved it
- Use “CBROM orig.bin /GROUP _EN_CODE.BIN” to insert the modified en code file into the BIOS image
- Flash the modded image
The expectation was that the ‘c’ in "Main Processor : " on the POST page would change to ‘f’. What actually happened that the motherboard failed to start (bricked) and then I had to short pins 1 and 6 on the main BIOS chip to force bootup with backup BIOS.
So my question is, does this GROUP ROM[ 0] component require some different, special handling? How can I package the modified _EN_CODE.BIN back into the BIOS image so that the flash successfully happens, with the change reflected in the POST screen?