<What are "ART" chips? I've never heard of them, and apparently none of
<my serial ports have them.
<
<And if your serial ports do have ART chips, how is it that a software
<virus managed to remove them?
Good questions... I just put up a new PIII system and there ain't no art
chips on it, just standard EX chipset.
Allowing for the possibility that the UART (16550s) are somehow cooked
the solution would be a serial board plugged in. However the level of
integration is so high on the new generation board if the serial dies
the whole board is dead and would fail POST. I'll assume you mean UART
chips. If its a late model motherboard the two serial ports, the parallel
The FDC and IDE are all comming out of one of the 144leg chips. They
have little likelyhood of failure (they are 16550 cell libraires in the
ASIC) without taking other functions with them. they can be programatically
turned of from the CMOS setup (usually the advanced chipset function in
AMI). I've used that capability to map out on board serial port 2 for a
modem at the same address.
However if the bios chip is wrong and does not know of the local chipset
capabilities the board level initilization will not work and devices can
and will be left out. I found that out trying to use a bios chip from a 386
board for a more highly integrated 486 board... it did boot but many
functions were not right. it did prove the original bios chips was fried
(27C512P (OTC eprom) totally dead) I used my programmer to copy a BIOS from
a similar card into a handy 27C eprom and it worked fine.
Like I said if winders boots, major part of the machine has to be there
and working. It was true with ALTAIR and hasn't changed.
Then again I still run S100 hardware and VAX next to my P166.
Current prices for a new mother board without cpu are low enough to
consider replacement a viable option.
Allison
Received on Sat Mar 20 1999 - 20:48:43 GMT