Reviving Dead Ethernet Ports

Does your OnBoard Realtek Ethernet port seem dead ?
Can't you get it working on any Operating System ?
Are you getting the dreaded "Self-Assigned IP" ?

If so, this post is for you...

Fixing the Orange HardDisk Icons

Upon upgrading to OS X 10.6.3, the P55 chipset was supported OutOfTheBox.
But there's a downside...
Apparently due to a Gigabyte BIOS bug, all SATA hard drives appear as External (Orange Icons).

While it's just a cosmetic issue, it affects the familiar feeling of the OS X desktop.

Several methods were developed to overcome this.
I'll briefly describe the options here, and present my own 'Vanilla' Solution.

Optimal BIOS Configuration

Configuring the BIOS is something that almost every PC user had to deal with.

However, it's usually full of terms than even some tech-savvy users don't understand.
This lead vendors to provide a way of choosing "Optimal" settings.

I found out that, even after using Gigabyte "Optimized settings", there's a lot to improve !

With the settings here, we'll tune the PC to optimal settings.

Updating the Gigabyte BIOS

Updating the BIOS of a Gigabyte motherboard is very easy (and safe, thanks to the Dual-BIOS).

There are several alternatives for this:

• The Q-Flash Utility (embedded in the BIOS),
• The @BIOS Windows utility
• The FLASHSPI.EXE MS-DOS utility (included with the BIOS update)

Unpacking the Gigabyte BIOS without Windows

Before moving on to installing the OS, let's take care of updating the BIOS.
Gigabyte publishes (quite often) updated BIOS with new features and fixes.
So let's download and unpack the new BIOS.