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AwardBIOS "Summary Screen"

I have a bunch of Neoware CA10 thin clients that I am configuring as diskless workstations for a class I'll be teaching this fall. In documenting my efforts, I've had to reference BIOS settings to ensure the device is ready for PXE boot as well as configuring the various hardware in the device so they are each in a consistent state (I want to use a single file-system image to serve all of them).

One of the switches in the BIOS allows the "Summary Screen" to be displayed at POST. This summarizes the resources in the target, disks installed, ram present, processor speed, etc. Useful tidbits to have EASILY accessible (though some can be found elsewhere in the Setup Mode).

The BIOS writers tried to dress this up with line graphics, etc. AS IF it would occupy the entire display at some point during the boot sequence (makes sense to be able to quickly review the capabilities of the machine!).

*But*, it is immediately followed by an enumeration of the PCI devices in the target. As a result, the "Summary Screen" scrolls off the top of the display -- before you can even get a peek at it! (it actually *appears* in it's scrolled position; it never *moves* off the screen!) [I've filmed the display with a movie camera and examined the results in slow motion to verify the top part of the "summary" is never "visible"]

Of course, no way to route this to a printer or to a log file as the system hasn't even tried to boot an OS, yet!

I've tried to stop the scroll with XON/XOFF, Scroll Lock, etc. but it seems to be intent on doing its thing BEFORE listening to the user.

There's no way to shrink the PCI device inventory as everything is on the "motherboard" -- it's not like I can pull out cards to eliminate devices! And, no BIOS setting that shows the "Summary Screen" WITHOUT the PCI device enumeration.

[I.e., developers weren't really THINKING when they made these decisions!]

Any other suggestions to try? I'm presently looking through google images to see if I can recognize a similar screen (as the last few lines ARE visible at the top of the display).

I may also grep the boot ROM images on the assumption that there is probably a const template that is filled in at display time and I could recreate the data that should be displayed by examining the "field labels" in that template.

If push comes to shove, I can just "carelessly forget" to include this information in my documentation. But, I tend to be far more thorough than that.

[OTOH, I have other things fighting for my time and, in The Grand Scheme of Things, I could just as easily type up a table of the targets characteristics and ignore the "Summary Screen" entirely...]

Thx!

Reply to
Don Y
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I know what you're talking about. AFAIK there is no solution. There might be some way to include a serial console output in the BIOS image. then grab the chars from the serial port(if it has one). But you'd have to disassemble&modify the image. If the printScreen thing still works.. Idk... last time I used was years ago, and it would print what's currently on screen, so would likely not show the missing lines either... also had a parallel port printer back then...

There was something there...

Reply to
Johann Klammer

Try again. The Pause/Break/Brake key should work for most BIOS's: If you catch it when the first screen appears, it will stop instantly. Touch any key, and it will display the rest of the hardware/IRQ list. Yes, I know it's dumb but unless you want to do your own open source BIOS, there's not much that can be done to fix it.

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Reply to
Jeff Liebermann

the printscreen button does what it says on the lable. if the device has a printer port attach an ASCII capable printer and then hammer the button,

AFAIK unlike printscreen, none of those are supported by bios. OTOH you could try pause.

or perhaps the BIOS can boot in 43 line mode?

an old-school fixed sync VGA display, they tend to respond to video signal presence much faster than LCDs.

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Reply to
Jasen Betts

Nope. *It* decides how much it wants to be seen on a "screen". All I can do is try to slow it down or "look faster".

With the "movie camera approach", that *might* let me capture a frame or two earlier than the "start up time" of the LCD monitor. Note, however, that the monitor is already sync'ed (sunk?) to the video output as there is another "Detecting IDE drives..." screen that appears immediately before this. I suspect the real problem is just the speed at which characters can be painted onto the display. Unless the BIOS writers intentionally put a "pause point" in the display painting, it's always going to be faster than me...

Reply to
Don Y

Your post took a decade to make it to this newsgroup.

Reply to
Cydrome Leader

I had to do something very similar to what you're doing many years ago when I was writing a manual for a motherboard when I worked for a motherboard company and I needed dumps of the setup screen.

I figured out a way to do it using the parallel port.

I hooked up a parallel to serial converter to the parallel port, hooked the serial side to another computer running Laplink, and when the BIOS screen came up I did a PRTSCR. The contents of the screen were dumped to the parallel port and I captured the stream via the parallel to serial converter.

I guess I was lucky that in this case PRTSCR was functional even during boot-up.

IIRC, there was some problem I had with Laplink where one character would be interpreted as the end of the stream (CTRL Z ??), but it was near the end so I could finish manually.

This was in the 1990's, I can't remember the whole setup, but it was a device like this: .

Reply to
sms

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