AN7 BIOS Upgrade

Things started when I tried to hook a Hitachi Ultrastar 1TB sata II hard drive to my ABIT AN7 mother board. Computer freezes at bios stage, hard drive model was correctly identified but not its capacity. System halted at that stage.

Initially I though it was a mismatch between sata1 and sata2 since ultrastar is sata2 and an7/built in sil3112 sata controller supports only sata1. I tuned down the hard drive to sata1 using 'feature tool' from Hitachi website. Nothing changed.

Then I found old versions of sil3112 bios doesn't support big hard drives(over 500G?). I went to silicon image website, got latest bios (4284.bin, published on Dec 2008). However, I couldn't flash it to EPROM since an7 has sil3112 built in. Tool from silicon image handles only add-on controller on PCI cards.

On ABIT website, I found their latest bios (an7_19.bin) was published in 2005. It doesn't support big hard drive either.

Now the problem boils down to integrating latest sata bios (4284.bin) into latest motherboard bios (an7_19.bin) and flash it to EPROM.

cbrom came to rescue. the following three commands replaces whatever sata bios in an7_19.bin with latest sata bios:

'cbrom6 an7_19.bin /pci release' releases sata bios component you choose from MB bios file.

'cbrom6 an7_19.bin /pci 4284.bin' integrates latest sata bios into MB bios file.

'cbrom6 an7_19.bin /d' double check 4284.bin is there.

flash an7_19.bin into eprom using awdflash.exe provided on abit website.

set jumper and clear CMOS as AN7 manual says.

The world went back to normal again.