AWARD BIOS Question(s)

I am on one of my learning adventures again. Today I decided to learn as much as I can about BIOS, as my long term goal is to make an operating system I need to learn BIOS eventualy. I found a program called ctbios15 and one called amimbid, they are suposed to gather information about your motherboard through the BIOS ID and such. ctbios15 worked but it was in another language, i think german or something, amimbid did not get my any info at all. At startup, i wrote down the numbers at the botom of the screen, I looked them up at www.wimsbios.com
I found my version of bios and the corosponding motherboard chipset. I was woundering since ctbios was not in english does anyone know of such a utility that is in english?

I would recommend simply going to the BIOS manufacturer and reading information there. AWARD BIOS, for example, has been bought out by Phoenix Technologies (as seen here: http://www.award.com/) If you look through Phoenix's site, they have information regarding how thier BIOS works, how to set it up, how it interacts with the OS, etc. Hope that helps.

AJ

10X, I did find the information manualy, but I wanted a short cut incase I ever lost the info and wanted it back with ease, the program I downloaded worked great except for the fact that it was in a language I could not read, and since it was in a DOS windows, I could not just copy and paste the text into a translator such as the one google has. But I will be sure to check out their web site. Thanks for the help.

Here are some web sites where you can get information regarding the BIOS:

Mini-Tutorials/Articles
Lost Circuits http://www.lostcircuits.com/advice/bios2/1.shtml
Bios Connections http://www.electrocution.com/biosc.htm (First 28 pages from book)
SysOpt http://www.sysopt.com/articles/recoverbios/index.html (Recovering BIOS)

General Info
Abios http://abios.com/

Tweaks
3D Spotlight http://www.techspot.com/tweaks/bios/index.shtml

Forum
Bios Central http://www.bioscentral.com/wbb/main.php

Links
Trish’s Hardware Hell http://www.hardwarehell.com/bios.htm

Utilities
Unicore http://www.unicore.com/techsupport/award/awardutils.htm

I downloaded both the Detect and CTBios programs to ensure they were in English and both worked fine. The programs will provide the following information about your BIOS (Note: Detect is specific to the Award BIOS.)
Detect – Computer ID, BIOS Date, Award BIOS Found, Award ID String, Board/BIOS Version, OEM (Motherboard), URL (to MB manufacturer) and Chipset.
CTBios – Program (Unicore program name), BIOS date, BIOS Type, BIOS ID (date repeated), Chipset (includes revision number if any) and Superio[sic] (MB chipset {eg Intel 486, 586}, revision number and IRQ handler port).

For other utilities, I’d suggest going to the site for the specific motherboard manufacturer, although I have seldom found any for other than flashing.
. . . . . vvirtho

thank you all, i found those links helpfull and educational. I find the POST (power on self test) to be fascinateing, i have learned that one part of the post is to check for a bootable disk, and it does that by reading a certian memory location on each disk in the order spesified by the boot sequence, till it finds a signature that identifies it as bootable, this way if i want to make a operating system, the first step will be to make a bootable disk. I did an example with the free NASM assembler, it was a floppy, and upon boot up, the floppy gets controll because it is labled as bootable with a certian hex value, it then prints no boot disk on the monitor and frezes. It was fun.

10X again for all the help, i will continue to look for a simular utility to the one i had.