I decided to evict the Award BIOS for Coreboot, for some advanced features, such as UEFI for example (upcoming BIOS won't support EFI, so I decided to give Coreboot a shot), however, I first tried a well-known working firmware snapshot in archived ZIP files of motherboard firmwares. For my Gigabyte GA-MA78GM-S2HP Rev. 2.0 - I picked firmware ROM from /GIGABYTE_MA78GM/ folder, and then burned that copy onto the main firmware ROM flash chip, and several power-downs hoping the backup BIOS won't think of silly idea of overwriting the main firmware flash with Award BIOS. The verdict: IT WORKED!
However, I am getting rather strange behavior from WIndows XP - whenever it boots up, it crashed (from safe mode, it stopped dead after "giveio.sys" file was loaded - I think it could be AMD CPU driver that loads after giveio.sys) - otherwise, Linux live CD distro (that I used to burn the firmware) loaded fine on the computer. I am thinking it could be the bugs in SeaBIOS.
System specification: Gigabyte GA-MA78GM-S2HP (AMD 780G / SB710 chipsets) - similar to GA-MA78GM-US2H Gigabyte brand (can't remember model) AMD Radeon HD 4670 PCIe 2.0 1GB video card (used as a main VGA controller) Crucial Ballistix 2GB DDR-II 800MHz Dual-Channel kit AMD Phenom II X4 Deneb 940 Black Series (for some reason, the firmware told it to run at 2.0GHz instead of 3.0GHz) Western Digital OEM Caivar 40GB SATA hard drive (WIndows XP Home Edition w/ SP3) Western Digital Caivar Blue 500GB SATA-II hard drive (secondary) ASUS DRW 2014-L1T SATA DVD-RAM burner PS/2 keyboard (PS/2 mouse won't work so I am using USB mouse. An excuse for getting all USB keyboard and mouse! :) )
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Donovan Lavinder