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Updated: Friday, April 4, 1997
Contents
For technical support, contact your place of purchase -- which will have the most current information about your specific product or configuration. You also can check the Intel FAQ for that product.
Processor Questions
BIOS Questions
Graphics Questions
General Questions
General Processor Questions
Pentium processors with MMX technology require special voltage support from the motherboard.
All recent Intel-manufactured motherboards also offer an upgrade path using Overdrive(r) processors. These motherboards will be tested for compatibility as new OverDrive processors become available.
You should contact your place of purchase for the latest information concerning your specific product.
General BIOS Questions
You should always contact your OEM for the latest BIOS support on your OEM system. The BIOS files made available by Intel are designed for standard products only and may not work with your specific configuration.
A "static device resource conflict" warning message while booting Windows 95 may be generated from a number of different, unrelated situations. The majority of users reporting this issue have a Pro Audio Spectrum 16 card installed. The Windows 95 registration for this card includes both 10-bit I/O addresses (201H and 388H) and 16-bit aliases to these addresses (A201H and F388H). The BIOS detects that the 10-bit address will also overlap with the 16-bit address and flags this as a resource conflict. Since it is a single card requesting both these resources, the warning can be ignored in this case.
There are also reports of other configurations causing static resource conflict warnings. Some of these instances appear to be corrected by clearing the ESCD area in NVRAM. This can be done by performing a CMOS clear:
The recommended setup for hard drives with the AMI BIOS is as follows:
You should contact your hard drive manufacturer if you continue to have issues with setting up your hard drive.
There are two known issues involving CD-ROM or secondary hard drives:
The 32-bit Disk Access driver that is supplied with Windows 3.1x is based on the Western Digital 1003 or ST506 hard disk controller standard. Newer hard disk controllers are no longer based on this standard. You will need to consult your hard drive manufacturer for a 32-bit driver and installation instructions for this driver.
Contact your system provider concerning availability of the released IDE bus master drivers.
In some cases, if only a single IDE device is connected to either the primary IDE channel or to the secondary channel, the BIOS may wait for a non-existent slave device to be initialized. If this happens, the BIOS will wait until it determines that the non-existent slave device is not responding, and go on. This can be avoided by marking the slave device as "Disabled" in the Setup menu.
The process is as follows:
You should also ensure that if you have performed a BIOS upgrade that you have performed a "CMOS clear" after the upgrade process is completed.
Many older PC BIOSes supported only CHS mode for IDE disk drives, even if the IDE drive itself was capable of supporting a more advanced translation mode. When this IDE drive is connected to an Intel Advanced motherboard, the drive will 'tell' the system which translation modes it is capable of supporting. It does not tell the system which mode was being used when the drive was formatted. If a mismatch occurs, the disk drive may exhibit problems when used.
There are two possible solutions:
Pentium® processor-based motherboards manufactured by Intel prior to the Advanced product line do not support IDE hard drives larger than 2 GB. There are no BIOS upgrades planned for these earlier products, such as the Premiere/PCI II. Connecting a drive larger than 2 GB to one of these systems may result in one of several symptoms, depending on your hard drive configuration. In most cases -- such as where only a single IDE drive is being used, or where the drive is configured as a slave in a master/slave pair -- the hard drive will not be recognized by the BIOS or by your operating system's partitioning utility. If the hard drive is a master in a master/slave configuration, the system may freeze during boot. Many hard drive manufacturers supply a utility that allows the full capacity of the hard drive to be accessed in these situations. Microhouse’s EZ-Drive* and Ontrack’s Diskmanager* are two such utilities. Please contact your hard drive manufacturer for specific information.
The Advanced product line and more recent Pentium processor-based motherboards manufactured by Intel will support IDE hard drives larger than 2 GB. All Pentium Pro processor-based motherboards manufactured by Intel also support the large IDE hard drives. If you are having issues configuring your IDE hard drive on one of these systems, please refer to the other entries in the IDE Questions section of this FAQ.
If you are using an operating system with an advanced file system (such as Windows NT and NTFS, or OS/2 and HPFS), you can partition/ format and use the entire drive as one device.
For MS-DOS* or Windows* 95, the FDISK utility can partition hard drives up to 4 GB in size. However, the MS-DOS file allocation table (FAT) cannot support individual partitions greater than 2 GB. Hard drives larger than 2 GB must be divided into multiple partitions of 2 GB or less. The Microsoft Knowledge Base contains additional information in the following articles:
Operating System and Software Questions
The DWCFGMG.SYS file which is installed by the ISA Configuration Utility (ICU) is used for Plug and Play functionality in DOS/Windows 3.1x and should not be used with Windows 95. Using the ICU with Windows 95 will cause a conflict with the Windows 95 device configuration manager and the ICU's device configuration manager. The Windows 95 device manager should be used for configuring system resources in Windows 95.
Memory Questions
Most Intel motherboards use tin-lead SIMM sockets and Intel recommends NOT mixing dissimilar metals in your memory solution. Studies show that fretting occurs when tin comes in pressure contact with gold or any other metal. Tin debris will transfer to the gold surface and oxidize. Continued transfer will build up an oxide film layer. Tin surfaces always have a natural oxide. Despite this, electrical contact is easily made between two tin surfaces. Oxides on both soft surfaces will bend and break, ensuring contact. The resistance of the oxidation layer builds up over time when one surface is hard. Increasing the contact resistance will ultimately result in memory failures.
Source: Edward Bock, AMP P316-90, Mateability of Tin to Gold, Palladium, and Silver.
Graphics Questions
You can do the following:
You can install an ISA or PCI add-in VGA adapter and the BIOS will automatically disable the on-board video controller when the add in video card is detected.
When using Windows 95 you need to do the following:
I/O Questions
The serial cable pin out may be different on your motherboard. On Intel motherboards, the following pinout is used:
Serial Port DB9 Pin Number Pin 1 1 2 6 3 2 4 7 5 3 6 8 7 4 8 9 9 5 10 No connect
General Questions
Boot times of about 20 to 30 seconds are normal for Intel-manufactured PCI motherboards. Some of the functions that the BIOS performs during system boot are the Power On Self Test (POST), scan for add-in cards with BIOS extensions, configuration of PCI add-in cards, assignment of system resources to devices that are needed to boot the system, and the isolation of ISA Plug and Play cards. The BIOS also checks for, and configures, IDE devices connected to the onboard IDE interfaces. System boot times can vary with different add-in hardware combinations.
Boot times may be reduced by using the BIOS Setup utility to disable entries that correspond to unused IDE devices. The process is as follows:
You should also ensure that if you have performed a BIOS upgrade that you have performed a "CMOS clear" after the upgrade process is completed.
The ATX form factor is a different form factor than previous motherboard products. ATX has different requirements for mounting, cooling and peripheral connections.
The ATX specification is available at http://www.intel.com/design/motherbd/atx.htm.
Additional ATX information also is available at
http://www.teleport.com/~atx.
The ATX specification has no special requirements for ISA or PCI cards.
The PCI Bus has 5V, +12V and -12V being supplied to it. The 3.3V connector is necessary for compliance with the PCI specification. If you require 3.3 volts supplied to the PCI bus, you will need a special power supply or voltage regulator.
You can do the following to troubleshoot your motherboard:
You can also perform CMOS clear or BIOS recovery to see if this corrects the problem. Consult the documentation from your place of purchase for details.
Errors can occur during the POST (Power On Self Test), which is performed every time the system is powered on. Fatal errors, which prevent the system from continuing the boot process, are communicated through a series of audible beeps. The following list shows the beep codes and corresponding error messages for Intel-manufactured motherboards that use the AMI BIOS:
Beeps Error Message Description 1 long, No video card found Applies only to baseboards with no on-board video. 2 short 1 long, No Monitor connected Applies only to baseboards with an on-board video present. 3 short 1 long, Video related failure Other video beep codes may exist and are tied to specific video BIOS x short implementations. Contact the vendor for details should the need arise. 1 Refresh Failure The memory refresh circuitry on the baseboard is faulty. 2 Parity Error Parity is not supported on this product, will not occur. 3 Base 64KB Memory Failure Memory failure in first 64 KB. 4 Timer Not Operational Memory failure in first 64 KB of memory, or Timer 1 on baseboard not functioning. 5 Processor Error The CPU on the baseboard generated an error. 6 8042-Gate A20 Failure Keyboard controller (8042) may be bad. BIOS cannot switch to protected mode. 7 Processor Exception The CPU generated an exception interrupt. Interrupt Error 8 Display Memory Read/ The system video adapter is either missing or its memory is faulty. Write Error Not a fatal error. 9 ROM Checksum Error ROM checksum value does not match the value encoded in BIOS. 10 CMOS Shutdown Register The shutdown register for CMOS RAM failed. Read/Write Error 11 Cache Error/ The external cache is faulty. External Cache Bad
