PTGD1-LA mainboard manual and non-HP bios

[billiebobt]

Anybody know where to find these, looked all over the Asus site without success.
Thanks for ant help

 

[Paul]

Anybody know where to find these, looked all over the Asus site
without success. Thanks for ant help

When HP uses a board, the version is custom made for HP.

In some cases, when Asus makes one of these OEM boards, they
make a virtually identical version for retail as well. Those
are the cases where messing around would be the most productive.

Looking through the current Asus list of products, I don't see
anything that matches the picture here. Your board is a microATX
PCI-Express video board, but with no PCI-E x1 slots, only the
x16 for the video card:

http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/genericDocument?lc=en&cc=us&docname=c00297771

Let us say you grab the BIOS for a 915 board that uses DDR
memory. You somehow manage to bypass the flasher check for
the Asus product string. You flash in the Asus BIOS.

If you were to do that, you might find some of the onboard
peripherals (LAN, firewire) might stop working (as the new
BIOS doesn't know how to enumerate them). If the motherboards
differ in the definition of any special purpose GPIO signals
(which are used to turn stuff on and off), there is no way
of knowing what will happen.

At the very least, if you want to turn your motherboard into
a guinea pig, buy a BIOS Savior from ioss.com.tw (about $25),
as that device gives you dual BIOS chips. You can then do
as many experiments as you wish using one BIOS chip, and if
any of the experiments fails, you simply flip the switch on
the BIOS Savior, and run the original HP BIOS again.

Yes, people have done the kind of brain surgery you are
proposing before, but it helps a lot if the motherboards
bear some resemblance to one another, from an architecture
and implementation standpoint. Flashing the BIOS is not
an insurmountable problem, but will be a challenge
nonetheless.

(For example, you could purchase a preprogrammed BIOS chip
from badflash.com, but what BIOS image do you use to do the
job ? If you are going to try this route, you will also need
to make sure the size of the BIOS chip on the HP board is the
same as the size of the BIOS image coming from the Asus board.
An OEM board is likely to use a smaller flash chip than a
regular Asus board, because that reduces the manufacturing cost
by a bit, which makes the brain surgery yet more complicated.
With LPC flash chips, this is probably not a big deal, and
just requires that the flash chips used are big enough to
hold either an Asus or an HP image.)

If you want to see a datasheet for a flash chip, look at
page 16 of this document. This product comes in several
sizes, but this datasheet only shows two of them and how
they differ in operation:

http://www.pmcflash.com/resource_center/docs/Pm49FL002-004 V1.4.pdf
(from http://www.pmcflash.com/products/fwh.cfm)

HTH,
Paul

 

[Tony]

When HP uses a board, the version is custom made for HP.

In some cases, when Asus makes one of these OEM boards, they
make a virtually identical version for retail as well. Those
are the cases where messing around would be the most productive.

Looking through the current Asus list of products, I don't see
anything that matches the picture here. Your board is a microATX
PCI-Express video board, but with no PCI-E x1 slots, only the
x16 for the video card:

http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/genericDocument?lc=en&cc=us&docname=c00297771

Let us say you grab the BIOS for a 915 board that uses DDR
memory. You somehow manage to bypass the flasher check for
the Asus product string. You flash in the Asus BIOS.

If you were to do that, you might find some of the onboard
peripherals (LAN, firewire) might stop working (as the new
BIOS doesn't know how to enumerate them). If the motherboards
differ in the definition of any special purpose GPIO signals
(which are used to turn stuff on and off), there is no way
of knowing what will happen.

At the very least, if you want to turn your motherboard into
a guinea pig, buy a BIOS Savior from ioss.com.tw (about $25),
as that device gives you dual BIOS chips. You can then do
as many experiments as you wish using one BIOS chip, and if
any of the experiments fails, you simply flip the switch on
the BIOS Savior, and run the original HP BIOS again.

Yes, people have done the kind of brain surgery you are
proposing before, but it helps a lot if the motherboards
bear some resemblance to one another, from an architecture
and implementation standpoint. Flashing the BIOS is not
an insurmountable problem, but will be a challenge
nonetheless.

(For example, you could purchase a preprogrammed BIOS chip
from badflash.com, but what BIOS image do you use to do the
job ? If you are going to try this route, you will also need
to make sure the size of the BIOS chip on the HP board is the
same as the size of the BIOS image coming from the Asus board.
An OEM board is likely to use a smaller flash chip than a
regular Asus board, because that reduces the manufacturing cost
by a bit, which makes the brain surgery yet more complicated.
With LPC flash chips, this is probably not a big deal, and
just requires that the flash chips used are big enough to
hold either an Asus or an HP image.)

If you want to see a datasheet for a flash chip, look at
page 16 of this document. This product comes in several
sizes, but this datasheet only shows two of them and how
they differ in operation:

http://www.pmcflash.com/resource_center/docs/Pm49FL002-004 V1.4.pdf
(from http://www.pmcflash.com/products/fwh.cfm)

HTH,
Paul

Thanks Paul
I appreciate the lengths you went to in your reply and maybe I need to rethink.
Much obliged.
Billie

 

[DaveW]

It sounds like that motherboard was in an HP brand computer. In which case
it was specifically made for HP as a PROPRIETARY HP motherboard, and is NOT
supported at all by Asus.