On Thu, Oct 25, 2007 at 11:40:50PM -0400, William Case wrote: > Rhetorical question; how? Real question. Should there be a data sheet > or some documentation that tells me how the firmware for my machine's > BIOS works? Or, is my search fruitless because that info is > proprietary? It is unlikely you will find the full documentation for your motherboard. However you will likely find the documentation for every chip on the motherboard. You can get the cpu and chipset documentation for AMD and Intel. Last I checked it was free of charge to get the PDFs. I suspect Nvidia publishes their chipset documentation as well but I have not looked for it. In those documents you will find intrecate detail of what has to happen to initilize those chips. While you could grab Intel's System Integrators manual (vol 1 through n) I would recommend against it. You will be instantly overwelmed. Today's computers are complicated beasts. Instead go grab some old computer architechture books from the library. A booked that covered the 8088/8086 would be a bonus but just about any cpu architechture will be fine. -- sg