BIOS Update Emachines 320 With HP BIOS ( Old School Gaming PC Build Part 3 )

BIOS UPDATE

This will be classed as Part 3 of my Old School Gaming PC Build, while technically it's more part of Part 2, kind of Part 2.5, but I have decided to give this it's own post, as it may be helpful to others in it's own right.

As in Part 2, I am now using an older emachines 320, with an Intel 810 chipset motherboard, a Cognac+ 115661 Cognac 20000731 Rev. G to be exact.

115661 Cognac 20000731 Rev. G

Why update the BIOS? 

The stock emachines BIOS is old and very locked down, it also lacks support for 512mb of RAM, which is what I would like to upgrade this machine to. There may be other benefits but those are the two main issues I had with the stock BIOS.

But where will I find a BIOS update for such an old machine?

Finding a compatible BIOS update for this board wasn't as hard as I expected, it took some Google time & crawling through various old forum threads, as emachines / acer or whatever the brand currently falls under has no legacy support for these old machines, which is understandable.

As it turns out, there were many variations of this board used by a number of companies, luckily one of said companies were HP who have excellent legacy support for their older products, Including BIOS updates.

Firstly I tried this file:
Cognac BIOS Update Cog_211.exe

But this was not compatible giving a DMI error when attempting to flash.

The File that worked for me was this one:
HP Pavilion Cognac BIOS Update FresnoCognac_307.exe

My stock BIOS was 2.01, BIOS ROM chip labelled: COGN+ 306784 V. 2.01 as seen here:

COGN+ 306784 V. 2.01

As stated there were many variations of this board, some with only 2 PCI slots, others with a CNR slot etc, so a different BIOS file may be needed than the one that worked for me, which is why I listed the other file which didn't work for me. And as always flashing your BIOS can go wrong so do it at your own risk!

In order to flash the new BIOS we need to be in DOS, a simple boot floppy / startup disk will be fine, or if no floppy disks are available then you could easily boot from CD, making a boot CD with the extracted BIOS files and flash tool on it also, the flash program does not like HIMEM so stick with the really basic boot disk

Windows ME start up disk creator puts a load of other crap on the disk which takes up room and is not needed, but if you already have a C: drive then you can leave the new BIOS files in a folder on the C: drive and navigate there once you're in DOS, the readme file and HP website have further instructions.

Successful flash

Now sadly I forgot to take pictures of the original emachines BIOS and boot screen, but the boot screen looked like this:
And now after the BIOS update it looks like this:

So now my emachines 320 is erm.. a HP! But more importantly should now support the full 512mb of ram this board is capable of, although I can't test that until the RAM modules arrive, which should be some time this week, Now after the BIOS update windows booted fine and greeted me with "found new hardware" and done it's thing. Also do not forget to set the time / date, boot options and whatever else you need to in the new BIOS as the old settings will have been wiped out. but it should prompt you to do this on the first reboot after flashing anyway.

I wasn't adventurous enough to attempt to change the boot image to something custom but that may be possible with some form of sorcery and would be pretty cool, but I don't want to risk corrupting the BIOS which = bad times.

So what's next? 

Part 4 of course! and the ordering of a USB 2.0 card, just to make data transfer a lot easier and faster and also provide more USB ports as this only has 2, on in the front and one on the back.

EDIT:

512mb RAM arrived today, 2x256mb PC133 SDRAM popped it in and:

All Recognised and working! Also booted into Windows and it's working nicely. SUCCESS!!!


Build Part 1
Build Part 2