Butterfly BIOS

Skipping the memory test

If you hit ESCAPE while the Butterfly is testing memory, it will skip immediately to booting.

Self tests

If you hold down F1 after powering up the Butterfly, it will enter a menu that lets you run diagnostics.

There are several undocumented features here. If you enter the tests page and hit control-A, some extra tests are enabled. Hitting control-K enters a keyboard test. Hitting control-F enables a low level hard drive format option.

You can select which devices to test and then enter a diagnostic loop. Hit control-pause to terminate the loop.

Errors are logged to the parallel printer port (if enabled) and also stored to memory. Hit control-E to look at the in-memory copy.

Bypassing the Power-On password

Apparently there are "power-on password bypass pads" on the bottom of the bottom system board. I don't know how to use them...

Related Craig's Butterfly pages:

Back to Craig's IBM Butterfly page