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Advanced/RH Technical Product Specification •• Page 39
Appendix-H Motherboard BIOS
The Advanced/RH motherboard uses an Intel BIOS, which is stored in Flash EEPROM and easily upgraded using
a floppy disk-based program. BIOS upgrades can be down loaded from the Intel Applications Support electronic
bulletin board service, or the Intel FTP site. In addition to the Intel BIOS, the Flash EEPROM also contains the
Setup utility, Power-On Self Tests (POST), APM 1.1, the PCI auto-configuration utility, and Windows 95 ready
Plug ‘N’ Play. This motherboard also supports system BIOS shadowing, allowing the BIOS to execute from 64-bit
on-board write-protected DRAM.
The BIOS displays a sign-on message during POST identifying the type of BIOS and a five-digit revision code.
The initial production BIOS in the Advanced/RH will be identified as 1.00.01.CV0.
Information on BIOS functions can be found in the IBM PS/2 and Personal Computer BIOS Technical Reference
published by IBM, and the ISA and EISA Hi-Flex AMIBIOS Technical Reference published by AMI. Both manuals
are available at most technical bookstores.
FLASH MEMORY IMPLEMENTATION
The Intel 2 Mb Flash component is organized as 32 x 8 (256 KB). The Flash device is divided into five
areas, as described in Table H-1.
System Address FLASH Memory Area
F0000H FFFFFH 64 KB Main BIOS
EC000H EFFFFH 16 KB System BIOS RECOVERY
EA000H EBFFFH 8 KB Plug ‘N’ Play ESCD Storage Area
E8000H E9FFFH 8 KB OEM Logo Area
E0000H E7FFFH 32 KB System BIOS Reserved during boot
Table H-1. Flash memory organization
BIOS UPGRADES
Flash memory makes distributing BIOS upgrades easy. A new version of the BIOS can be installed from
a diskette. BIOS upgrades are available to be down loaded from the secure section on the Intel bulletin
board, or Intel’s FTP site.
The disk-based Flash upgrade utility, FMUP.EXE, has three options for BIOS upgrades:
• The Flash BIOS can be updated from a file on a disk;
• The current BIOS code can be copied from the Flash EEPROM to a disk file as a backup in the event that an
upgrade cannot be successfully completed; or
• The BIOS in the Flash device can be compared with a file to ensure the system has the correct version.
The upgrade utility ensures the upgrade BIOS extension matches the target system to prevent accidentally
installing a BIOS for a different type of system.