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Be very, very, very careful doing this.........
That can't be stressed enough.... but I can give you a few pointers, because I've done this myself
All my work was done on my Award BIOS, and I've never tried with an AMI BIOS, so please be careful, or else your motherboard is going to be dead...
I've done several BIOS mods, I've added a full screen boot logo to my Asus board, and in 3 different cases I've taken OEM HP Pavilion BIOS's and flashed the BIOS for the corresponding Asus board on there to fix issues with them. (HP uses, or at least used to a year ago, I don't know about now, OEM Asus motherboards.)
But, like I said, and like Le Cactus said, be careful.
Ok, here goes what I know about doing this:
Most of my knowledge is with Award BIOS's, so most of it will be useless to you, but there's some things that will be common to all boards and BIOS's.
1) Each and every motherboard and chipset is different. If someone has a motherboard made by Abit that is identical in chipset and features to say your board made by Asus, the BIOS's will still be different, so there's no gurantee anything mentioned anywhere about a specific board will work on a board similar to it. When building a motherboard, makers start with the basic chipset they wish to use for that board, be it from SIS, Via, Intel, AMD, Nvidia, or whoever else. Each chipset at it's core is the same across every motherboard, but the builders have a certain level of customization to the chipset they can do. Timings, locations of settings in the board registers, how the chipset north and south bridges interact with each other, bus settings, etc. can all be customized through either low level hardware tweaks or through software, and it varies from manufactorer to manufactorer.
2) Just because an option may be hidden does not mean it will work correctly. There is a reason that motherboard makers hide options. I know Award, and I'm pretty sure the same thing applies to AMI, issues a full featured BIOS to the motherboard makers. In turn, based on the customizations to the chipset and the rest of the motherboard, vendors will enable, disable, and alter whatever is needed in the original BIOS made by Award or AMI and ship it. If a feature is said to be hidden, then odds are it could be there from the original BIOS program made by Award or AMI, and then was disabled by the board maker because there wasn't a need for it on their motherboard. So that means that unlocking "hidden" features in your BIOS may not even be worth it.
This is different in the case of OEM PC's, from Dell, HP, Compaq, etc. They ship very feature limited versions of BIOS's on their motherboards, for the reason being that the less options a user has to play around with, the less tech support nightmares because of f'ed up BIOS settings they have to deal with. Take the HP Pavilion that's sitting in my basement for an example to this. We bought it used, and everything worked fine, except for the onboard video was going in and out a lot. I went out, bought a cheap Geforce2 MX PCI card, installed it, and it wouldn't boot, only give me 3 beeps from the system speaker. WTF I thought. I know the card should work, why isn't it? Six and a half hours later I finally determined there was no way to disable the onboard video and I would have to find out what model number the board is and flash the regular BIOS on it. Two days later after doing a ton of research I figured out it was an Asus Mew series board, I forget the number, and downloaded the BIOS for it. I booted to DOS, flashed, rebooted, and it worked like a charm. Went into the BIOS, adjusted all the RAM timings like I wanted them, disabled the onboard video, put the PCI card in there, and it's still running fine to this day.
Then in another case someone I know tried to do a similar thing to his Compaq and it completely went haywire on him. System would boot, but over half the hardware wouldn't work, including the IDE and Floppy Controllers, so he had no way of reflashing the bios and was left with a piece of junk. He eventually ordered a replacement BIOS chip and hotflashed the right BIOS on the chip, which requires you to boot a working motherboard, and while it's running remove the BIOS chip, insert the new one in the socket, flash a bios on it, remove it, replace the original BIOS chip, and then put the newly flashed BIOS chip into the board you want it to go on. It works, but you run the risk of both physically hurting yourself and killing the other motherboard too in the process.
If you want, you can send me the BIOS Mod proggy and a BIOS you want to unhide features in and I'll see what I can figure out and give you a walkthrough of how to use it as soon as I get time to do it. Are there any specific reasons you want or need to unhide BIOS settings?
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so I´m a bit scared if a flash goes wrong.
Linear Mode
