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Thunder K8S S2882 & large SATA drives

(if you’re looking for updates about my life, just ignore this geek article mostly posted so people googling for help on a subject I recently had trouble with will find their answer)

Just thought I’d post, in case anyone out there in google-land has a Thunder K8S motherboard and large (>500GB) hard disks, that flashing a new BIOS (3.09) image (see ftp://ftp.tyan.com/bios/2882_309.zip and flashing utility ftp://ftp.tyan.com/bios/flash/s2707/AMIFLASH.COM) will allow you to access those large drives without hanging on boot because of a bug in the SATALink bios. One interesting cavaet: you *must* clear the BIOS memory after flashing, or the system will not boot. Also, on my systems, after clearing the BIOS, I needed to load defaults (F2 at the ‘press F1 to run setup, or F2 to load defaults’) before I could go into setup and fix things – *anything* I did once in setup would just return me to being unable to boot. Clearing the BIOS is a matter of moving JP8 to the other two pins (it’s on the lower lefthand corner of the board, right next to the IDE sockets – see the manual at www.tyan.com. I *strongly* suggest writing the bios boot block as part of the flashing operation.

If anyone is trying to flash the BIOS from a USB CDROM, I suggest booting using the OpenDOS image on the ultimate boot CD (http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/) – choose option 3 immediately after booting, because you do not want EMM386 as it doesn’t play nice with SMP on this motherboard – and then burning the files above on a seperate CD and exchanging the ultimate boot CD for it. Or something.

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 28th, 2009 at 9:20 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

One Response to “Thunder K8S S2882 & large SATA drives”

  1. ClintJCL Says:
    March 2nd, 2009 at 11:10 am

    )))))

    BTW if you separate ( links in parens ) with a space around the link, they will tend to be auto-clickable more, tho i think with wordpress that applies more to comments as posts require explicit linkings no matter what.

    i had to reset my bios so many times once that it became a game to see how fast i could move that jumper… “Fastest cmos clearer in the west” i would say to myself.. imagining an 1800s saloon where 2 dirty cowboys would settle their differences by seeing who could clear their CMOS the fastest…

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