Asus Update

WinFlash

CBROM 2.15

C18E1013-3112-6421.BIN

and other files used to create the end result C18E1013-3112-6421.BIN file

to flash the Asus A7N8X-E Deluxe so that larger SATA hard disks are supported

by both the Sil 3112a RAID SATA controller and the VIA VT6421 RAID SATA controller

at the BIOS level.

Asus Update may in fact run WinFlash.exe for you with the appropriate parameters?

The steps to running Asus Update are to

Open Update.exe in Windows XP or whatever.

Select update bios from locally stored bios file image

Navigate to the unzipped file directory with the .bin files and so on

Select the C18E1013-3112-6421.BIN for flashing into your motherboard bios

Click OK (or Flash or whatever) to start the flashing

After rebooting, you must / should redo the settings for your Mainboard bios CMOS

settings because the new bios will require settings changes to insure

compatible settings are stored.

The bios for the VT6421 integrated into the mainboard bios will not display

anything unless there are devices attached to its connectors and they are

powered on.

In most Windows versions, the two SATA controllers are treated as SCSI controllers

and will show up in the device manager as such.

The MB bios itself refers to the Sil 3112a controller as RAID since this was always

integrated into the Asus A7N8X-E Deluxe mainboard. So, presumably, the VT6421 is

treated as a SCSI controller by the mainboard bios. The boot order settings

will be using these RAID and SCSI terms to determine which drive and controller

to use for booting.

CDROM or DVD or BD Blue Ray drives attached to the SATA controllers will boot

without any warnings (to press enter to boot from CDROM like the EIDE controller

bios does), so you must eject any bootable CDROMS / DVDs from such drives to prevent

them from doing so. This can be a major pain in the ass sometimes.

The steps used to gather these files and edit them and merge / remove bios modules

was found online in the saved html archive

"Tutorial 3112 Sata Inserting Bios 4_2_66 into Your MB Bios • nForcersHQ_com.mht"

that should open using MS Internet Explorer versions 6 or greater (maybe a

couple of lower versions too).

I downloaded the 6421V431.rom versions from two different sources and binary

compared the two. One was from Russia and the other was from DriverGuide inside

of the Viatech 4.10a Raid software package. Both files were identical.

A newer but non-Raid Sil 3112a bios with version 4270 was included here, but was

not recommended or tested because someone said that it might not work properly.

This 4270 Sil 3112a bios could be tested if you do not rely upon that controller

to boot your system. It will need to replace the MB bios module for the Sil 3112a

that is named 4266-cut.bin that I had merged into the Asus web site provided

C18E1013.BIN

To squeeze in the VT6421 boot rom bios into the MB bios, I had to remove the .bmp

OEM logo image that was about 300 kbytes or so in the original Asus supplied

C18E1013.BIN bios file. See the Tutorial .mht file for more information.