[Image] - Triton FAQ Frequently Asked Questions Triton IDE Subsystem Why can't I select Mode 4 (16.7 MB/S)? Why can't I select both drives' speeds separately? Why does my CD-ROM seem to run so slowly? How can I enable Bus-Master IDE? Which EIDE plug-in cards does MR BIOS support? Disk Questions & Answers Where's my CD-ROM? Where's my IDE drive? Why doesn't my >512M IDE work right? Does Linux O/S work with MR BIOS? Norton 8 says my disk is slower now ! Norton 9 Disk Doctor or Mortician? Chipset and Motherboard Does MR BIOS support my motherboard? The flash-loader refuses to run !? Does MR BIOS have built-in NCR SCSI bios? Which vendor's chipset is best? Upgrades for Mercury, Neptune, Aires, &tc.? I want to tweak cache and bus timings !? Other Hardware Issues Adaptec 2940 bios 1.20 bugfix Adaptec 2940 bios 1.21 bugfix Adaptec 8371 component "discrepency" Supra PnP modem bugfix NSC Parallel Port problems Does MR BIOS have built-in NCR SCSI bios? Does MR BIOS support EDO-RAM ? I bought a different type cache than reported !? Windows 95 I just loaded MR BIOS, and now Win95 won't work! Does 32-bit driver really improve IDE performance? Microsoft Mouse Driver Where's my PS/2 Mouse? Power Management Power Management Terminology --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Triton IDE Subsystem Why can't I select Mode 4 (16.7 MB/S)? The first reason for this is a physical limitation of the Triton chipset. It derives its timing from the PCI clock, and provides a minimum (fastest) cycle of 5 clocks. The maximum transfer rates achievable, in terms of MegaBytes/Second, are as follows: PCI-Clock = 25 MHz ..... Transfer Rate = 10 MB/S PCI-Clock = 30 MHz ..... Transfer Rate = 12 MB/S PCI-Clock = 33 MHz ..... Transfer Rate = 13.3 MB/S It slides downhill from here. The second reason is one of reliability. You will probably experience data corruption when the Triton is configured to run your Mode 4 (16.7 MB/S) drive at rates in excess of approximately 11 MB/S. For this reason, MR BIOS no longer selects rates beyond that automatically. If you want to run your drives faster, you'll need to manually override the automatic settings and experiment a little. To understand the Triton's Mode 4 problem better, obtain a small manual entitled "ATA SIGNAL INTEGRITY ISSUES" from Quantum Corporation. Why can't I select both drives' speeds separately? Could this be a manifestation of Intel's obsession with fair competition? In several aspects, the Triton's IDE subsystem appears to be a stripped-down imitation of genuine EIDE controllers from CMD, OPTi and others. It simply omits the provision to independently program the master+slave drive pair with separate EIDE transfer rates. Instead, they share a common timing register set. Each drive in the pair has two options: Run at the common EIDE speed, or run at the ancient AT-Bus speed (approx 1.8 MB/S). This means that both drives on the same cable must be run per the slower drive's requirements, or the faster drive may be run at full speed and the slower drive penalized all the way back to 1983 speeds. MR BIOS has a patent-pending ATA interface that is uniquely capable of managing a wide variety of IDE controllers. But never was such an uncompromisingly asymmetrical design anticipated. A back-door provision to select the one-fast, other-slow configuration is as follows: In the ATA-Disc setup utility, move the cursor to one of the drives' MB/S field. Scroll the rates until the slowest value is visible, noting that both drives' rates scroll simultaneously. Now, while the slowest rate is selected, either of the drive-pair's MB/S value may be increased independent of the other's. (In programmers' terms, the slow speed is sticky). Be aware that MR BIOS incorrectly displays the slowest rate as approximately 5 MB/S. That setting actually enables the sub-standard AT-Bus rate. Why does my CD-ROM seem to run so slowly? Because it is being run slowly! Again, this results from a limitation in the Triton design. When the "enhanced" transfer rate is enabled for a drive, the Triton automatically and cleverly enables fixed-size sector read-ahead and write-posting operations. Too cleverly, because Atapi CD-ROM's hybrid-SCSI protocol employs variable-size blocks which prohibit those advanced functions. As consequence, the EIDE transfer rate must be disabled and the ancient AT-Bus rate is the only remaining option. Be aware, the MR BIOS Setup Utility is unaware of Triton's shortcoming and incorrectly displays EIDE speeds for Atapi CD-ROMs. Failsafe code ultimately disregards the cmos setting (auto or manual MB/S) and enforces the required sub-standard AT-Bus rate. How can I enable Bus-Master IDE? Bus-Mastering IDE is claimed to deliver higher performance than conventional PIO methods. It cannot be implemented directly in BIOS though, instead requiring a device driver that is activated upon bootup. Did you receive such a diskette with your Intel Triton motherboard? If not, email support@cs.intel.com and learn why! [Image] --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Disk Questions & Answers Where's my CD-ROM? Per ATA specifications, MR BIOS requires that a single, stand-alone CD-ROM drive is configured as "master", and not as "slave". Change the jumper on the rear of your CD-ROM drive to "master", and it will then be recognized. This might seem a little unaccommodating of MR BIOS, and it is under review here at Microid Research. However, the slave-only config can actually leads to runtime problems. If software ever logged onto the (absent) master, you would likely end up with a "busy" situation that would be impossible to clear. While one drive is "busy", ATA protocol demands that you refrain from accessing the drives' shared registers. Thus, you could never log back onto the slave, except by violating ATA protocol. This could result in a hung system when accessing the CD-ROM drive. Sound familiar? Where's my IDE drive? A number of IDE drives tend to lose sanity if accessed too early during their initial spinup cycle. For this reason, the System Warmup Delay.....3 Sec field is provided in the Boot-Seq Setup Utility screen. If you disabled this in order to accelerate the poweron bootup speed and now your drive has vanished, you will apparently need to restore the delay. If it is still set to 3 seconds, try increasing it. Some recent model Maxtor drives refuse to be logged-in by MR BIOS when configured as the second drive (slave) on a cable. The technical reason is that those drives lose their reset status, and are then rejected by MR BIOS during a diagnostic status check. (It appears that an Adaptec 8371 component in the drive's electronics is the cause, and suggests that a few other OEM drives may also be afflicted with this "discrepency"). Currently, the only solution is to configure the Maxtor as the master, and the other drive as the slave. In the case of two Maxtor drives, place them on separate cables, both as masters. Why doesn't my >512M IDE work right? MR BIOS has supported multi-GByte discs since 1990. In the Version 3 core, ATA-disc setup was fully automated and the ability to manually select/disable translation was abandoned altogether as obsolete. If you are trying to re-use a >512M drive from a computer that contained another vendor's bios, it probably is formatted to a maximum of 512M, or contains a so-called disk-manager to break the 512M barrier. Either way, that drive's format is incompatible with the modern methods of MR BIOS. The only way to use it with MR BIOS is to re-FDISK and FORMAT it. Be sure to backup its content with the previous computer/bios beforehand! Does Linux O/S work with MR BIOS? If your IDE drive is >512M and your version of Linux does not understand translated drives, then MR BIOS will not work for you. There is no provision in MR BIOS to reduce a drive's size beneath its reported capacity. (Sorry). However, all 1.2.x versions do support this configuration. You can upgrade the kernel and version of LILO if necessary to enjoy the full capacity of your >512M IDE drive. (Thank you, C.G., for pointing this out!) Norton 8 says my disk is slower now ! After exclaiming that MR BIOS was using some kind of advanced disk controller and warning its results would be artifically high, Norton 8 in fact demerited MR BIOS disk performance with a lower index. ...And some of you folks actually believed it !? To solve this nuisance, MR BIOS Ver 3.20 reverts back to archaic methods that make Peter happy. (Don't worry, no performance was measurably lost). Norton 9 Disk Doctor or Mortician? After installing MR BIOS, there have been a few reports that NDD95 will misdiagnose your disk as ill even though Scandisk finds it to be totally healthy. Administering NDD95's cure at this point is likely to embalm your filesystem, so don't be tricked into doing it! Rehabilitate Peter instead. Un-install and then re-install Norton Utilities once prior to usage. Updated info: Most (all?) of the NDD95 problem reports have been traced to the cmos date being reset after running the flash loader utility. The flash loader intentionally clears the cmos memory to assure a clean-slate startup with the newly installed bios. Be sure to re-edit the date (especially, the century part of the year) after flashing MR BIOS into your computer. Beginning with Ver 3.26, the MR BIOS flash loader carefully avoids clearing the cmos date. [Image] --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Chipset and Motherboard Does MR BIOS support my motherboard? If it's a Triton design and you see it on the MR BIOS ShareWare page, then the answer is yes. If it's not a Triton design, please refer to the the MR BIOS Upgrades page. Otherwise, the answer is at best not yet. Please don't flood MR BIOS email with this inquiry! The flash-loader refuses to run !? For Intel and a few other vendors' motherboards, the MR BIOS ZIP file contains a single flash-loader that was specifically customized for it. The filename.EXE of that flash-loader will resemble the bios image filename.BIO. The remainder of the supported motherboards will typically use one of two categories of flash-rom, and their ZIP files contain either 29C010.EXE or 28F010.EXE or both flash-loaders. These loaders are general purpose, each supporting a family of similar flash-roms. In all cases, whether custom or generic, the flash-loader attempts to qualify the flash-rom in your computer is the type it is able to program. If not, a message to that effect is displayed and the flash-loader aborts upon your first keystroke. In such an instance, you should check that a write-protect jumper or other mechanism applicable to your motherboard is correctly conditioned to permit flash-write operations. If everything appears correct yet the loader refuses to operate, there is nothing left to do. Your motherboard cannot be upgraded with MR BIOS at this time. (Sorry). Do NOT attempt to use another vendor's flash-loader to upload the MR BIOS image! Does MR BIOS have built-in NCR SCSI bios? No, MR BIOS is not supplied with built-in NCR bios. But you can cook it up. Here's the recipe: First, download the 16K binary file ftp://ftp.symbios.com/pub/ncrchips/scsi/drivers/Utilities/flash3x.zip. Next, rename the 92K distribution MR BIOS ".BIO" file to a temporary filename, like MRBIOS. Then, pre-pend the NCR bios to the MRBIOS file using the DOS copy command: C:> COPY /b NCRBIOS + MRBIOS MRBIOS.BIO The "/b" means "binary" (as opposed to ascii text). The "+" causes the two files NCRBIOS and MRBIOS to be combined into the final, single file MRBIOS.BIO. Note the SCSI bios needs to be listed 1st before the MRBIOS file. Note also, the filenames used here are examples; you need to supply the actual filenames. Confirm the result MRBIOS.BIO is exactly 16K+92K=108K (110,592 bytes). If not, stop and figure out what went wrong! If yes, the MRBIOS.BIO is now ready to be loaded according to the instructions in the MRBIOS.TXT file. WARNING! Do this AT YOUR OWN RISK! If you're not sure you know what you're doing, then get someone to help you who does. Please be careful! Note: There is also now a file flash4x.zip on the Symbios site that appears to be more recent. It contains both a 16K and 32K ROM image. They appear to be intended for use directly on a PCI plugin card. If you choose to use one of these (instead of the version in the flash3x.zip file), you will also need to change the setting of the E000: Shadow-RAM to RW_Shadow in the MR BIOS Setup Utility. Which vendor's chipset is best? What kind of a question is this? Are there any competitors left in business? Upgrades for Mercury, Neptune, Aires, &tc.? Emphatically NO! Information was witheld from Microid Research during these chipsets' development cycles, and now it is impossible to backtrack the hideous details of their extensive revision histories. Good luck getting a bios upgrade from your original vendor. Remember, your purchase was a vote! I want to tweak cache and bus timings !? Then charge up your electric screwdriver, because you'll be using it. Unlike most chipsets in recent history (and contrary to the spirit of Plug 'n Play), the Triton chipset offers no provision to program these parameters. You can select (only two) AT-Bus speeds via jumper or dipswitch. The cache timing is not programmable at all. You expect performance can be increased by selecting more aggressive timing for dual-bank, interleaved asynchronous cache? Forget it with Triton, the cache is not interleaved. [Image] --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Other Hardware Issues Adaptec 2940 bios 1.20 bugfix Notice: All MR BIOS versions prior to Ver. 3.20 are incompatible with the short lived AHA 2940 V1.20 bios. It generates a malformed Adapter-ROM image in shadow-ram which, when executed, causes the system to crash. MR BIOS Ver. 3.20 is now aware of this booby-trap. Please be sure to update your MR BIOS, or steer clear of Adaptec 2940 cards with that afflicted bios! Adaptec 2940 bios 1.21 bugfix Notice: All MR BIOS versions prior to Ver. 3.22 may have spurious warm-boot (Ctrl Alt Del) failures with the AHA 2940 V1.21 bios. In an apparent attempt to fix a memory clobbering bug in Ver 1.20, the Adaptec V1.21 bios searches for a clear 128K block before performing its initialization. If it cannot find such a region, it exclaims Memory Error on the CRT and fails to continue. But there is no reason to expect a 128K block of zeros will be found during a warm-boot. To the contrary, MR BIOS attempts to preserve the memory content for compatibility reasons (...not anymore, if AHA 2940 is detected). Supra PnP modem bugfix A bugfix for Adaptec 1542CP PnP-ISA SCSI would provoke Supra PnP modem into losing its PnP configuration (and ultimately clobber COM1). Beginning with MR BIOS Ver 3.20, the 1542CP fix is abandoned to accommodate the popular Supra PnP modem instead. NSC Parallel Port problems The National Semiconductor Super I/O chip's parallel port is being a little troublesome. This component is found on many motherboards including Intel's and other vendors'. In the standard parallel port mode ("SPP"), it should provide pseudo-bidirectional functionality, but it is instead strictly an output port. If your application requires bidirectionality, you will need to change its mode to that respective setting via the Setup Utility Ports screen. Unfortunately, when set to Bidirectional mode, the NSC port fails several popular diagnostic programs. Beginning with MR BIOS Ver. 3.19, all four modes, SPP, Bidir, EPP and ECP have been made available in Setup Utility, allowing you to select the mode that best fits your requirements. Does MR BIOS support EDO-RAM ? Absolutely. And beginning with version 3.27, you can view your computer's entire memory configuration directly from the Chipset setup utility. So, what's the big fuss over 60 nS EDO-RAM anyway? It's just a natural evolution of dram technology for recent 50+ MHz memory buses. It offers only a very modest performance gain over conventional dram; maybe none at all in interleaved designs. Perhaps it's being confused with the patented 15 nS EDRAM from Ramtron that is genuinely innovative and significantly boosts performance. Benchmark your Triton board against Ocean-USA's Octek-DCA2 5x86 EDRAM board and see for yourself the advantage that EDRAM delivers! I bought a different type cache than reported !? MR BIOS detects your computer's cache size and sram type and configures things accordingly. You can view this information in the Cache Setup Utility. When external cache is absent, the only field in that screen will be the X86-CPU Cache (on/off) option. Otherwise, a Cache Size field will show its size, and an External Cache (on/off/none) field allows the cache to be enabled or disabled (or marked absent for debug purposes). If your system contains Asynchronous cache sram, nothing else appears in the Cache Setup screen. However, if your cache is comprised of either Synchronous Burst or Pipeline Burst sram, a Cache SRAM field will also exist which defaults to Sync-Burst or Pipeline, respectively. For debug purposes, this field can be toggled, but doing so and saving that (wrong) choice will result in your computer hanging upon bootup. Although there are other possible reasons, it is true in general that if the sram type has been misconfigured, your computer will simply hang upon bootup. If the reported sram differs from the type you bought, yet your computer boots correctly, please consult with your hardware vendor and/or a qualified technician before sending email to Microid Research! [Image] --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Windows 95 I just loaded MR BIOS, and now Win95 won't work! In some cases, it seems that Win95 needs a little manual encouragement to become adjusted to the new bios environment. As a first attempt to correct things, go to the Device Manager and view the current configuration. The steps to get there are: (1) click Start, (2) click Settings, (3) click Control Panel, (4) click System icon, (5) click Device Manager. At this point, a graphical representation of your system's hardware will appear. Now, one-at-a-time, select and click Remove for each item that is visibly incorrect and/or you know to be misbehaving. Exit the Device Manager back into the Control Panel, and click the Add New Hardware icon to invoke the Hardware Wizard. Your computer's configuration will be redetected there, and hopefully upon completion, it will be corrected. In most cases, this does work and your computer will now run Win95 better than ever before. But if you find Win95 stubbornly refuses to adjust, choke it with your CD-ROM and run Win95 Install from scratch. Does 32-bit driver really improve IDE performance? Well, Core Test doesn't think so. In fact, Core Test typically registers more than 20% transfer rate increase when the Win95 32-bit disk driver is disabled! You might want to review your system's disk performance with 32-bit access disabled vs enabled, to see which way actually delivers best results for your installation. Follow these steps to change the 32-bit file system setting: (1) click Start, (2) click Settings, (3) click Control Panel, (4) click System icon, (5) click Performance, (6) click File System, (7) click Trouble Shooting, (8) check (or uncheck) "Disable all 32-bit protect-mode disk drivers". Or, to change it explicitly: (1) click Start, (2) click Settings, (3) click Control Panel, (4) click System icon, (5) click Device Manager, (6) click Hard disk controllers, (7) select and click the specific controller entry, (8) uncheck (or check) "Original Configuration (Current)". [Image] --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Microsoft Mouse Driver Where's my PS/2 Mouse? The original IBM PS/2 extends the standard BIOS data area by "stealing" the top 1 Kbyte of precious Base 640K memory, reducing it to an effective 639K. That area is sometimes called the Extended BIOS Data Area ("EBDA"). It seems the only useful thing in there is the PS/2 Mouse data storage. In contrast, MR BIOS is concerned with conserving and optimizing memory usage. To this end, the runtime MR BIOS image is condensed to maximize available Upper Memory Blocks ("UMBs"), and the wasteful EBDA is not employed. Instead, the few PS/2 Mouse variables are stored in the standard BIOS data area (where they really belong). Unfortunately, from time to time you will come across a Microsoft Mouse driver that assumes the EBDA exists unless you explicitly tell it otherwise. To do so, you will need to create or edit the driver's .INI file (usually MOUSE.INI) as follows: [mouse] MouseType=PS2 FailIfNoExtendedBIOS=False [Image] --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Power Management Power Management Terminology In the Energy Setup Utility screen, you are presented two different activity monitoring options. Local activity includes only keyboard and mouse, whereas Global activities include everything the Triton is equipped to sense. If the selected activity type occurs before a power management timer expires, then the system will remain awake. Similarly, that activity will awaken the system if it is already asleep. There are two separate timers, providing independent control of two separate low-power state machines. Standby is a mildly power-reduced sleep state that occurs after a brief period of inactivity; when you are momentarily distracted from work at your computer. Suspend is a severely power-reduced sleep state that occurs after a longer period of inactivity; when you leave your computer unattended. [Image] --------------------------------------------------------------------------- [Image]