T2460 with a Sapphire Radeon 9700 Pro

The following is mirrored from here

eMachines and new graphics cards – my adventure.

Welcome friend.  I am not a computer expert – just a guy who paid for some hardware and had an adventure trying to get it all to work.  If this exposition is of any help then I will be happy.  If it isn’t, then at least I tried to help.  Naturally, if anything gets screwed up, it is YOUR fault and not mine.  And so.

This is my story of how I put together an eMachines T2460 with a Sapphire Radeon 9700 Pro.  It all started when I saw a CNET review that recommended the eMachines T2200SE – looked like a great box for $999 so I called eMachines with the intent of laying down me hard-earned dollars.  The T2200SE had been discontinued so I decided to build one myself.  I ordered up the eMachines T2460, Sapphire Radeon 9700 Pro and an extra 256Meg of memory.  Got a deal on free shipping and it all came in just a bit above $1000.

But it was not to be trivial.  The box came up without a problem, and I was real happy with the way XP recognized all the stuff I had and got me up and humming on the internet in no time.  Memory was no problem to add, but the 9700 card proved to be a problem.  And therein lies this story.  THERE IS A HAPPY ENDING – everything now works fine, but it took a flash of the BIOS to get there … if you’ve got the nerve, the information below should help!

Early steps:  I installed the ATI driver and the Control Panel from the CD, and I plugged the 9700 card into the AGP expansion slot, hooked up the power to the card, unhooked my monitor from the motherboard connector and attached it to the 9700 card port.  I powered everything up expecting it all to work just fine!  After the boot-up, the control panel complained:  “The ATI control panel failed to initialize because no ATI driver is installed, or the ATI driver is not working properly.  The ATI control panel will now exit.”  Fortunately, the monitor seemed to be still driven by the on-board video so at least the screen wasn’t dark.  A quick look at Control Panel / System / Hardware / Device Manager / Display Adaptor showed two entries “RADEON 9700 SERIES” and “RADEON 9700 Series – Secondary” … unfortunately the first one had not installed properly:  it complained that the card on PCI bus 1, device 0, function 0 could not find enough free resources – it gave me the dreaded “code 12” … whatever the heck THAT means!

Driven to the internet, I discovered the following bunch of resources, some of which you may find helpful as well:

1)  The most recent drivers from ATI … the find-a-driver tool in the menu is helpful if you have a different model … these are the ones I eventually used, although I’m sure that the ones on the Sapphire CD would have done fine.

2)  The Unofficial eMachines Help Site was valuable … I was able to track down exactly what motherboard was in the box.  The “motherboard information” link took me to a table of eMachines models and their motherboards.  It was there I learned that I had an AM37 Mainboard … I was on my way.

3)  Some google searching led me to the manufacturer’s site for some more background information and eventually a source for my new BIOS!  Along with the new BIOS came awdflash.exe to help me install it and some detailed instructions.

 I won’t bore you with all the blind alleys – you’ve probably been down a few by now.  The bottom line is that the eMachines box was not letting me disable the on-board video.  The bios that came with the machine was crippled and the options which allow this sort of thing had been removed.  The manual that came with the eMachines motherboard indicated that there WERE some video options, but they didn’t appear in the CMOS options … in order to disable the on-board video I would need to replace the crippled BIOS with one which allowed access to all the options … including one which turned off the on-board video.  I was scared.  Before all this I had no idea about CMOS and BIOS and drivers and stuff like that … so forgive me if I include too much information below – most of this was new to me.

 GET YOUR INFORMATION TOGETHER

1)  Download and install the latest ATI drivers from the ATI site above – install the drivers and the control panel even though they won’t work yet.  Pop in the 9700 card and hook your monitor up to it.

2)  Download the latest BIOS from the motherboard site (the example for the AM37 motherboard is First International Computer and the link is above).  The zipped file came with a flash BIOS installer (awdflash.exe) and the image of the BIOS (latest was vlb44.bin on this day).  For different motherboards you’ll have to do your own research … these worked for me!

3)  Grab a blank floppy disk – you’re going to make a boot disk.

4)  Note your KEY for windows XP – it’s a collection of five groups of five letters and numbers that I found on a sticker on the back of my eMachines box.  Just makes it easier to have it handy ahead of time.

 MAKE YOUR BOOTABLE FLOPPY

1)  Stick in a floppy

2)  GO to Start / My Computer where it shows the drives

3)  RIGHT click on the A: drive and select “Format”

4)  On the form that pops up, select “Create an MS-DOS Startup disk”

5)  Click Start …

6)  After it is done, copy the awdflash.exe and the vlb44.bin BIOS image onto the floppy (after you unzipped the file you got from the above link)

 PLAY A LITTLE WITH YOUR CMOS SETTINGS

1)  Shut down the box and choose the restart option

2)  As the box starts to boot up, hold down the “Delete” key – this will interrupt the boot-up and allow you to access some menus which change the settings in your CMOS … now, I’m not real sure what BIOS and CMOS are, so you’ll forgive me if I exchange them at times … you’re smarter than me so I’m sure you’ll figure out what I mean.

3)  You’ll get a menu of stuff – with some instructions at the bottom to show you how to navigate and change parameters and stuff.  If you’re not familiar with these menus, poke around a bit … unless you explicitly save things you won’t do any damage.  And even if you do, there are options over on the right to get you back to where you were when you began.

4)  When you are comfortable, you DO want to change a couple of items and SAVE the result of your changes.  Here’s what you want to change:

a.  In the advanced BIOS features, DISABLE the BIOS guardian – this will allow you to use the new BIOS image a bit later.

b.  Change the boot order so that FLOPPY comes first – this may not be necessary, but that’s what I did.

c.  SAVE your changes and exit.  You haven’t done anything drastic yet, but you’re ready to!

d.  You’ll notice a change when you continue the boot-up sequence:  since the guardian was disabled, you’ll see a screen that shows you the version of the current BIOS – Mine was VLB411H – this is the version of the BIOS that eMachines put on the box before it shipped.  And you’ll actually have time to read it ‘cause you need to hit the space bar before continuing.

e.  Write down the currently installed BIOS version – like VLB411H for example (yours may vary I’d guess)

f.  Let the box come up to windows … surf a little and take a deep breath.

 READY TO FLASH THE BIOS NOW

1)  Time to put that boot floppy in the floppy drive – you know, the one with the awdflash.exe program and the new VLB44.bin BIOS image

2)  Shutdown and restart the box – it should boot from the floppy disk

3)  You’ll see the “A>” DOS prompt

4)  Type “DIR” and check to see if the files are where you expect them to be

5)  Here we go … we’re going to execute the BIOS flash by typing at A:

a.     awdflash.exe   VLB44.BIN    /nbl (that's a letter "L" in nbl switch)

6)  The screen will come up with the awdflash.exe interface.

7)  It will take a few moments to get oriented, tell you the FLASH “type”.  Since you gave it the filename, it will fill that in and ask you if you want to Save a copy of the old BIOS … answer YES … definitely YES.  Name the file with the name of the version you wrote down from the earlier boot screens – VLB411H in my case.  (I don’t know if you need to use the same name, thankfully I didn’t need to find out!)

8)  Note the /nbl switch – it will prevent failing because of bad checksums … it took me quite a while to tumble to THIS little nugget (thank you google – google on BIOS FLASH /NBL for a few random notes on boards, etc).

9)  The awdflash.exe tool will write the BIOS and verify it … when it is done, it will tell you to Remove the floppy and hit F1.  Take a deep breath and do so.

10) As it boots up, it should show you that the new version (VLB44) has been loaded – presuming everything went well.  VLB411H is a thing of the past.

 FINAL STEPS

1)  Let it boot up to windows – you’ll be asked for the Windows XP KEY I reminded you to write down (from the tag on the back of the box).

2)  Don’t be tempted to stop now though – even though your new 9700 card is now working … you’ve got one more step before you break out the champagne.

3)  Reboot again, and hold the “Delete” key down while the machine is coming up – you’re going to go back to those CMOS editing screens.

4)  Look around at the menus – note that there are considerably more options now … this is a good thing.  You need to change a few of them … here are the ones that I needed to change in order to get things back to normal:

a.      I turned the GUARDIAN back on … better safe than sorry

b.     I put the original boot order back:  CD / Floppy / Hard Disk

c.      The PNP OS flag should be YES (XP is a Plug-‘n-Play Operating system)

d.     I enabled the Onchip USB control (my USB devices wouldn’t function otherwise)

5)  Just for fun, visit the Standard CMOS Setup section and look at the “VIDEO” selection that didn’t used to be there.  I think this was the cause of most of my pain so I stared at it a bit.

6)  SAVE and exit for the last time

Boot up to windows and start trying to figure out all the bells and whistles on your new graphics card.  Power down the whole box and go have a beer.  You’ve earned it.

If this helped a little, drop me some email at fah @ monmouth.com … I’d enjoy hearing from you but don’t expect any technical guru who can answer questions – just a guy who lucked into some good information on the World Wide Web.

gneenthegnome

01.26.05

Alternative BIOS To The Above Post

I have found a better bios to flash the emachines AM37 board with, at least it is better if you still want windows to believe you have an emachines computer anyway. You see, I had 2 emachines. Both had the AM37 board but one would work with ATI cards and the other would not. The one that did not work had bios version vlb411h the one that did [W2247] had bios version vlb415h. So I flashed the vlb411h computer with the bios copy from the one that worked. Now both work. Both ID as vlb415h. [This bios file (vlb415h-am37.zip) is available in the download section for this motherboard]
Dave