Marvell Serial ATA BIOS extension driver ---------------------------------------- Introduction ------------ The BIOS extension driver is a driver firmware that it's main task is to enable PC compatible systems to boot operating systems. The operating systems can be Windows 2000, Linux or DOS or others ... The driver firmware is usually loaded into the adapter's, and the BIOS in POST can load the driver firmware into system memory and thus enabling the boot. Another alternative for mother board vendors, is integrating the driver's firmware into main BIOS. Using the BIOS extension driver ------------------------------- There are mainly two kinds of BIOS version ; PnP BIOS and non-PnP BIOS. While booting from PnP BIOS or non-PnP BIOS, the BIOS extension driver will be executed by the BIOS and proper messages on the monitor will show the version of the BIOS extension driver and the hard drives detected on the serial ATA channels. While using PnP BIOS, the user will have the ability to select the hard drive to boot from using the BIOS specific menus (depends on the BIOS vendor). While using a non-PnP BIOS the first hard drive detected in the system will be bootable. Building the BIOS extension driver ---------------------------------- 1.. Download and install Watcom C compiler version 1.0 on a Windows 2K machine on C:\watcom directory (default). The installation should be an installation for 16bit dos / 32bit dos / 16bit Windows / 32bit Windows targets. (http://www.openwatcom.org/) 2.. Unzip the release into any directory. 3.. Open command line and change the directory to the release directory. 4.. Change the directory back again to the BiosIAL directory. 5.. From the command line, run the makeBiosDriver.bat The compiled images are - 1.. The driver itself (under driver/biosimage.com). 2.. tools/generateImage/generateImage.exe application - This tool takes the biosimage.com as the basic image and adds to it all the PCI expansion ROM headers with the required checksums and produces a raw binary image that can be loaded into flash. 3.. mvFlshUp.com - A utility that can be run under DOS for loading a specific ROM image to an adapter. Note that this tool does matching between the PCI expansion ROM headers and the device ID of the required adapter. Loading and Updating BIOS extension driver on Marvel Serial ATA adapter ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 1.. Boot the system with DOS version 3.3 or higher. 2.. Put the mvFlshUp.com and the required image on diskette. For example, if the adapter is 88SX6081 then the required image is 6081.IMG. 3.. Put the diskette on floppy A and execute 'mvFlshUp 6081.IMG' in case the required adapter is 88sx6081. 4.. The mvFlashUp utility will scan all PCI devices with the corresponding device ID (in the previous example, it will scan 88SX6081 adapters) and prints a list with the adapters with the version numbers installed on it (if any). 5.. Follow the instructions and choose the required adapter.