"Dingleberry" said:
What does the "AddOn ROM Display Mode" setting do? The available options are
[Force BIOS] or [Keep Current]. The docs are no help at all, at least to
me, unfortunately.
http://www.ami.com/support/downloaddoc.cfm?DLFile=support/doc/MAN-875.pdf&FileID=604
"Option Description
Force BIOS: This value displays the option ROM even if the option
ROM is set to not display during boot. This is the
default value.
Keep Current: This value allows the option ROM to determine
whether or not it is displayed."
As an example, say you have a SATA RAID chip on a motherboard. The
Asus BIOS will include an "option ROM", which is a BIOS driver code
module that Asus binds into the BIOS. At POST, the option ROM code
runs, to initialize the RAID chip. One of the services the option
ROM would provide for example, is INT 0x13 disk read services, in
case you wanted to boot from the drive.
Let us say there are no drives connected to the RAID chip.
The option ROM code is capable of checking to see if there
are disks connected to the chip. If there are no disks,
the module might quietly unload itself, delivering no messages
to the screen. If you select "Force BIOS", then the option
ROM might display on the screen "No disks found" or other
verbose messages about what it is doing. "Keep Current" would
respect any non-verbose mode the Option ROM happens to have.
It doesn't sound like this setting entirely disables anything.
If you are having trouble getting a peripheral chip on your
motherboard to work, the "Force BIOS" setting would be the
most optimistic setting you could use, as it might
encourage any option ROM code to run at POST. If you want
a chip to stop working, then look for an option to disable
the chip in the BIOS instead.
HTH,
Paul
