croy wrote:
On Mon, 25 Mar 2013 08:40:32 -0400, Paul
wrote:

The "Award v6.00PG" is the development stream of the Award software.
You would hope, that all the BIOS created for a particular motherboard,
are developed using the same tool flow. Changing BIOS tools mid-stream
is not a good idea, as it can introduce more bugs.

Award is a BIOS company. They provide core code, to make motherboards
work. The motherboard manufacturer writes less of the code as a result.

In fact, a large number of companies contribute code. So it's not
like a single developer sits in the basement at Gigabyte, and cranks
out custom code from nothing. To a large extent, it's like conducting
a symphony - the BIOS developer is a "conductor", assembling the parts,
and tuning stuff.

The "Award v6.00PG" then, isn't a revision.

You will see a BIOS string printed on the screen

05/19/2004-VT8623-8235-CLE26I01C-00

and the date there might be indicative of the release.

Since the BIOS image is a small file system, you can
also take the BIOS all apart, into its constituent parts,
uncompress it, then view the results as a series of
plaintext strings. And figure out stuff from that.
With older Award BIOS, the internal compression method
is LHA. This package can help with the disassembly, and if
you look for posts discussing this package, you'll find worked examples
of how to do the disassembly of it.

ftp://ftp.heise.de/pub/ct/ctsi/ctmc10.zip

If you use your BIOS flashing tools, to make a "backup copy" of
the current BIOS contents, you can analyse that and decide what is
resident inside the machine right now. Or, take a photo of the
first BIOS screen, and figure it out using the "BIOS string" printed
on the screen.


Thanks Paul.

From the first screen of the BIOS, I see:

09/04/2006-C51-MCP51-6A61HG0LC-00

That's at the very bottom line on the screen.

Is that the "BIOS string" you were referring to?


Yes, that's the BIOS string.

If I Google that, I can sometimes find a reference to it.

http://www.wimsbios.com/biosupdates/gigabyte.jsp

Gigabyte GA-M55PLUS-S3G Athlon 1100 rev 0 FIB GA-M55PLUS-S3GV2 09/04/2006-C51-MCP51-6A61HG0LC-00

So even without looking up the date of the BIOS, on the Gigabyte web site,
I can guess at what release it might be (F1B).

One reason for using BIOS strings, is for tracing down
motherboards which have no labels on the motherboard
surface. Some of the PCChips branded motherboards, they
have no label on the motherboard. For those motherboards,
you use the BIOS string to try to figure out the
motherboard information. Every little bit of information
helps.

Paul