Navigate: Advice Beginners BIOS Guide CPUs Links Mainboards Memory Network Storage Video/Sound Cards Contact Forum SiteMap Sponsors Home PC Hardware from Made-in-China.com Search: Enter your search terms   Web www.lostcircuits.com Submit search form	.
Prices:

In the case of the standard Award v6.00 PG BIOS, the main page usually looks as follows:

Standard CMOS settings

This page usually contains the parameters that are prone to being changed during each new installation of a mainboard.

Real Time System Clock

The primary features of this page are the real time system clock containing the date and time of the system which are subsequently fed to the operating system to put a time stamp onto each file opened or modified as well as email. If the time stamp is wrong, very often, emails end up in an inappropriate position in the receiver's mailbox and are not seen unless specifically searched for. In other words, if you want your files (including email) to be catalogued correctly, it is worth spending the extra 10 seconds to specify the correct time and date.

IDE Devices

The other main feature of the standard CMOS setting page is the recognition of the drives, including floppy and IDE devices. There is an almost unlimited number of IDE devices, such as hard disk drives, CDROMs, Zip drives and the like available, further, these drives can be combined in any possible combination as primary or secondary masters or slaves. Therefore, it is necessary to have the BIOS read the model specific parameters of each device and incorporate them into the system setup parameters. In case the size of a given drive exceeds the BIOS limitations (750 Mbyte, 2 Mbyte, 8 Mbyte, to mention some of the older BIOS limitiations), a so-called dynamic drive overlay (DDO) can be used to override in software the BIOS parameters and enable the larger drives.

IDE autodetection

(This page is usually found towards the end of the main BIOS screen but since it directly relates to the main page, we do an out of order execution and handle it right here).

Reading the individual parameters of the devices used can take up a certain amount of time, therefore, some BIOS have an extra page called HDD autodetection, IDE Autoconfiguration or similar. Using the routine specified in this page, the system searches for the different IDE devices attached to the two channels and reads the parameters. The user is prompted to confirm the correct configuration, after which the data are saved to the CMOS. After running IDE autodetection, the drives recognized will have their fixed entries in the Standard CMOS settings showing a user defined value. As a consequence, at boot-up, the system will no longer have to seek the drive parameters since they are hard-coded in the CMOS and the Power On Self Test will run faster.

The drawback of a predefined setting is that, in the case that one of the devices is changed (e.g. a larger, faster HDD), the new drive may be recognized incorrectly and the POST screen will display an error message. In this case the autodetection needs to be rerun or the drive entry in the Standard CMOS settings must be reset to Auto.

Floppy drives (n/a)

Contained within the Standard CMOS settings are also the parameters for the two different floppy drives allowed on most current mainboards. In most cases, though, the Standard CMOS setting page only contains the entries of whether the devices are present or disabled.

Halt On (no errors)

The last important setting in the Standard CMOS setup concerns the Halt On .. entries. That is, if the system encounters a non-specified error during boot-up, it will come to a stop. In the past, this setting has led to severe headaches amongst the overclocker community since one of the Errors was designed to put a lid on overclocking. That is, if the system was running out of specs, a so called Speed Error would prevent the system from successfully booting.

Other options are Halt on all errors / except keyboard / no errors. The drawback of specifying a no errors setting is that data corruption can occur as a consequence of e.g. too high PCI/IDE bus speed exceeding the capabilities of the HDD used.

Video Mode (VGA)

In most cases, this setting is obsolete in that hardly anyone still uses a CGA 40 or CGA 80 graphics adapter (limited to 40 and 80 lines, respectively), neither are many monochrome adapters still around that would require the specification as such in the BIOS. Basically all graphics adapters today conform to the EGA or VGA specifications which should be enabled.

next page:    => more BIOS settings =>