UM4980 motherboard, need to upgrade the PhoenixBios 4.03

[CaptDon]

I have an old 486 UM4980 ver 1.4 03-02-1995 with the horrible PhoenixBios 4.03  The system currently has many DOS based programs for Ham Radio and has Windows 3.1 installed. The hard drive is a 3.2GB with one single 2GB partition. This computer serves a specific purpose and is rack mounted with an internal SVGA monitor and is the sole reason I am even fooling around with this thing. My target is a 10GB IDE hard drive and Windows 95. The motherboard is maxed out at 64MB of RAM. the only hold up seems to be the flawed 4.03 BIOS. Any ideas?? I see small footprint 486 motherboards are insanely priced these days or I would swap it out. Thanks!!

[HwAoRrDk]

What is the limitation you're facing with it currently? Sorry, but it wasn't explicit from your post.

Lack of support for larger hard drives? In that case, you could try XTIDE. Either buy/make a dedicated boot ROM card, or put the ROM in another card that has a ROM socket (e.g. network card).

Or just the BIOS is bad/buggy? There is an Award BIOS listed on the page for that motherboard on The Retro Web, but it is older than what you have, and only appears to be for revision 1.1 boards.

Why not swap out for something newer than 486? If you're restricted by need for supporting ISA cards, plenty of options using Pentium II/III, Cyrix, AMD, etc. that still have ISA and AT form factor.