[opensuse] WTF?! NO floppy in Lucid or in Meerkat!
I've busted my balls over the past 2 days trying to figure out why my floppy will not be recognised and display the contents of a floppy disc. I need the floppy to be able to flash the BIOS on a pre-loved mobo I bought 2 weeks ago. I buggered around trying to figure out why the floppy (floppies actually on all the 3 Ubuntu systems I have) won't work - when all did work under the previous distro I was using. And what do I now find? The floppy drive is not really catered for by Ubuntu Lucid, or even Meerkat (I've tried) now! Here is a gem from a Lauchy discussion on this matter: QUOTE
NoOp [2010-08-31 2:20 -0000]:
Can one of the devs listed in the assigned: Andy Whitcroft and Martin Pitt please explain the status?
You already summarized it pretty well. None of the devs have a floppy disk, so debugging them is a pain (as much of a pain as floppy disks are in the first place..) Personally, the last one I had was 2002..
So for now, I'm afraid that you have to use an older Ubuntu release for now, or use the downgraded version for a while.
I'm sorry that this isn't the answer you are looking for, but it's the current situation.
UNQUOTE Note: none of the devs computers with a floppy....so for all you silly bums and no-hopers who do have one.....tuff teaties! And for all those who still spout the line that Ubuntu will run on all hardware -- get real! It's crap! (Also, just FYI, and this might explain a few things, all the devs appear to be using laptops, not desktops, for their work; this also stated in this "bug thread".) There are, however, at least a couple of "fixes" for the above wonderful regression but one of them, which is to be issue on the cli, "devkit-disks --mount /dev/fd0" comes up with the error message that nobody on this planet knows the command "devkit-disks" except, most likely, the one who actually mentioned it in the bug-discussion. The first "fix" was to insert "floppy" as a new line in /etc/modules - which went down like a lead balloon in my case. And the last, is to replace in Lucid the latest udisks package from ubuntu with the earlier udisks.1.0.1build1 (by using Package:Force Version) -- this courtesy of NoOp. And, of course, there is no way that you can do this Package:Force Version in Meerkat. Alright, now that I have vented my frustrations accumulated over the past 2 days, does anyone have a REAL clue to make anything-Ubuntu recognise a floppy drive and display the contents of the disc in it and even format the disc? (Having stated this, the suggestion in the bug-discussion is to keep running an earlier version of Ubuntu - I think it is Karmic but don't quote me.) If you want to see all of this for yourself then here is the bug-discussion: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/lucid/+source/udisks/+bug/441835 BC -- I didn't know it was impossible when I did it. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org
On 24/09/2010 16:26, Basil Chupin wrote:
I've busted my balls over the past 2 days trying to figure out why my floppy will not be recognised and display the contents of a floppy disc.
My apologies to all. I posted the above in the wrong mail list. Mea culpa. However, check if this may still apply to you in your OS. BC -- I didn't know it was impossible when I did it. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org
On Friday 24 September 2010 01:33:05 Basil Chupin wrote:
On 24/09/2010 16:26, Basil Chupin wrote:
I've busted my balls over the past 2 days trying to figure out why my floppy will not be recognised and display the contents of a floppy disc.
My apologies to all.
I posted the above in the wrong mail list. Mea culpa.
However, check if this may still apply to you in your OS.
yes and no dolphin has a place in "Places" for floppy drive, and when i click it with a floppy in the drive the light comes on and it tries to read it for a while, then gives this long error: An error occurred while accessing 'PC Floppy Drive', the system responded: org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.NoReply: Did not receive a reply. Possible causes include: the remote application did not send a reply, the message bus security policy blocked the reply, the reply timeout expired, or the network connection was broken. i'm running opensuse 11.2, kde 4.3.5, so at least i'm on the right list, but it sure looks like i can't look at my old floppies either i've got a lot of old floppies around (i am pathologically unable to throw any old software or books away) and it'd be fun to see what's on some of them... sc -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org
On 24/09/2010 17:00, sc wrote:
On Friday 24 September 2010 01:33:05 Basil Chupin wrote:
On 24/09/2010 16:26, Basil Chupin wrote:
I've busted my balls over the past 2 days trying to figure out why my floppy will not be recognised and display the contents of a floppy disc.
My apologies to all.
I posted the above in the wrong mail list. Mea culpa.
However, check if this may still apply to you in your OS.
yes and no
dolphin has a place in "Places" for floppy drive, and when i click it with a floppy in the drive the light comes on and it tries to read it for a while, then gives this long error:
An error occurred while accessing 'PC Floppy Drive', the system responded: org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.NoReply: Did not receive a reply. Possible causes include: the remote application did not send a reply, the message bus security policy blocked the reply, the reply timeout expired, or the network connection was broken.
i'm running opensuse 11.2, kde 4.3.5, so at least i'm on the right list, but it sure looks like i can't look at my old floppies either
i've got a lot of old floppies around (i am pathologically unable to throw any old software or books away) and it'd be fun to see what's on some of them...
sc
Yeah, right...so it seems from the above that you don't really know if you are able to read/write floppies. How about really trying to see if you CAN read/write to your floppies and let us know the results? Thanks. BC -- I didn't know it was impossible when I did it. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org
On Fri, Sep 24, 2010 at 08:33, Basil Chupin wrote:
I've busted my balls over the past 2 days trying to figure out why my floppy will not be recognised and display the contents of a floppy disc.
My apologies to all.
I posted the above in the wrong mail list. Mea culpa.
However, check if this may still apply to you in your OS.
In some respects I can understand. I haven't had a floppy drive in any computer I own for close to 10 years now. Despite your current need for it, it really is obsolete technology to the vast majority :-( If you go to the local big computer shop.. finding a pre-built computer with a floppy drive - while still possible in some areas - really is a challenge. I'm already at the same point now with my DVD drive. Only one computer I have has one, and on the next update it'll probably be removed. To me and many others, DVDs are on the edge of obsolete... just like floppy drives were 10 years ago. Most of the motherboard manufacturers have been supplying bootable CD ISOs of their flashing software for several years now... does the manufacturer for the board you're working with do the same? C. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org
On 24/09/2010 17:10, C wrote:
On Fri, Sep 24, 2010 at 08:33, Basil Chupin wrote:
I've busted my balls over the past 2 days trying to figure out why my floppy will not be recognised and display the contents of a floppy disc.
My apologies to all.
I posted the above in the wrong mail list. Mea culpa.
However, check if this may still apply to you in your OS.
In some respects I can understand. I haven't had a floppy drive in any computer I own for close to 10 years now. Despite your current need for it, it really is obsolete technology to the vast majority :-( If you go to the local big computer shop.. finding a pre-built computer with a floppy drive - while still possible in some areas - really is a challenge.
I'm already at the same point now with my DVD drive. Only one computer I have has one, and on the next update it'll probably be removed. To me and many others, DVDs are on the edge of obsolete... just like floppy drives were 10 years ago.
Most of the motherboard manufacturers have been supplying bootable CD ISOs of their flashing software for several years now... does the manufacturer for the board you're working with do the same?
I consider this to be totally irrelevant to the point. I see nothing in the description of the distros which shows that it/they will not work on anything other than the very latest, not more than 2 years old, hardware. In fact, the claim is that they will work on the very basic computers with no more than, say, 256MB of RAM. The kernel which is used has not degenerated into a mindless piece of jelly. It still has the ability to handle floppy drives. It's the people, the devs, who are responsible for not making their distros able to make use of what the kernel can handle. Read the bug-report discussion I quoted (by accident, sorry :-( ) in this ML. BC -- I didn't know it was impossible when I did it. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org
On Fri, Sep 24, 2010 at 3:10 AM, C
In some respects I can understand. I haven't had a floppy drive in any computer I own for close to 10 years now. Despite your current need for it, it really is obsolete technology to the vast majority :-( If you go to the local big computer shop.. finding a pre-built computer with a floppy drive - while still possible in some areas - really is a challenge. I'm already at the same point now with my DVD drive. Only one computer I have has one, and on the next update it'll probably be removed. To me and many others, DVDs are on the edge of obsolete... just like floppy drives were 10 years ago.
This is the biggest problem with technology. As more and more people replace their older machines, they don't relate to those who still make use of and stick with older technology because it works for them. I picked up a used Dell laptop floppy drive that can be connected as a USB for my newest system since I only need to use a floppy occasionally. However, I make use of DVDs and CDs reguarly, and couldn't imagine not having them. I also use a Pentium3 laptop as my main on the go machine. However, with the increasing feature creep and higher requirements of newer software, I wonder how much longer it will be useful. Oh well. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org
On Fri, Sep 24, 2010 at 16:20, Larry Stotler wrote:
This is the biggest problem with technology. As more and more people replace their older machines, they don't relate to those who still make use of and stick with older technology because it works for them. I picked up a used Dell laptop floppy drive that can be connected as a USB for my newest system since I only need to use a floppy occasionally. However, I make use of DVDs and CDs reguarly, and couldn't imagine not having them. I also use a Pentium3 laptop as my main on the go machine. However, with the increasing feature creep and higher requirements of newer software, I wonder how much longer it will be useful.
You also face the issue of not being able to buy things like blank floppies. Do you know of anywhere you can buy 8" floppy disks? 5.25" floppy disks? Even 3.5" floppies aren't common. I started out using 8" floppy disks... I don't keep trying to use that drive though. I know what you are saying, and I agree to a point... but... as technology evolves, you either evolve with it, or you're stuck with an OS that is contemporary to the hardware you're trying to use. For me, I've switched to USB sticks for installing Linux, and carrying data around with me. At home, my data is stored on hard drives - all my backup is to hard drives. I stopped using DVDs and CDs as long term storage when I discovered... they are not a good choice for long term storage. You're lucky if you get more than 18 months out of a home burnt bargain priced DVD or CD blank... that's about what I averaged up until I stopped using them. Some lasted longer, and a few I've had for 10+ years with no issues, but the vast majority became unreadable somewhere around the 2 year mark - there is a lot of info on this on the internet if you're interested. My main on-the-go machine is an Asus EEE which works perfect with Linux.. an has no CD/DVD drive.... so USB is teh only choice for external storage or OS installs. There is nothing wrong with using older technology, but you cannot expect nor demand that the latest OS will always work with older tech. This is the same with Windows, the various Apple OSes, and Linux. I've got Microsoft branded hardware that will not work at all in Windows 7, although it works perfect in Windows XP (and actually even better in Linux). If I want to use it, I use WinXP.... an OS that is of the same relative release time frame as the hardware. I find the same applies to Linux. Anyway.... I still think floppies, while verging on extinct are still a device that should be supported for a little while longer :-P C. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org
On Fri, Sep 24, 2010 at 10:31 AM, C
On Fri, Sep 24, 2010 at 16:20, Larry Stotler wrote:
This is the biggest problem with technology. As more and more people replace their older machines, they don't relate to those who still make use of and stick with older technology because it works for them. I picked up a used Dell laptop floppy drive that can be connected as a USB for my newest system since I only need to use a floppy occasionally. However, I make use of DVDs and CDs reguarly, and couldn't imagine not having them. I also use a Pentium3 laptop as my main on the go machine. However, with the increasing feature creep and higher requirements of newer software, I wonder how much longer it will be useful.
You also face the issue of not being able to buy things like blank floppies. Do you know of anywhere you can buy 8" floppy disks? 5.25" floppy disks? Even 3.5" floppies aren't common. I started out using 8" floppy disks... I don't keep trying to use that drive though.
I think 3.5" floppy media are about to be discontinued. Maybe next year. Google for an announcement. About half our machines still have a floppy, but I can't say we use them much.
I know what you are saying, and I agree to a point... but... as technology evolves, you either evolve with it, or you're stuck with an OS that is contemporary to the hardware you're trying to use.
For me, I've switched to USB sticks for installing Linux, and carrying data around with me. At home, my data is stored on hard drives - all my backup is to hard drives. I stopped using DVDs and CDs as long term storage when I discovered... they are not a good choice for long term storage. You're lucky if you get more than 18 months out of a home burnt bargain priced DVD or CD blank... that's about what I averaged up until I stopped using them. Some lasted longer, and a few I've had for 10+ years with no issues, but the vast majority became unreadable somewhere around the 2 year mark - there is a lot of info on this on the internet if you're interested.
My main on-the-go machine is an Asus EEE which works perfect with Linux.. an has no CD/DVD drive.... so USB is teh only choice for external storage or OS installs.
There is nothing wrong with using older technology, but you cannot expect nor demand that the latest OS will always work with older tech. This is the same with Windows, the various Apple OSes, and Linux. I've got Microsoft branded hardware that will not work at all in Windows 7, although it works perfect in Windows XP (and actually even better in Linux). If I want to use it, I use WinXP.... an OS that is of the same relative release time frame as the hardware. I find the same applies to Linux.
Anyway.... I still think floppies, while verging on extinct are still a device that should be supported for a little while longer :-P
I definitely think floppies should still be supported. If testers are needed, I could easily volunteer.
C.
Greg -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org
On 9/24/2010 3:10 AM, C wrote:
On Fri, Sep 24, 2010 at 08:33, Basil Chupin wrote:
I've busted my balls over the past 2 days trying to figure out why my floppy will not be recognised and display the contents of a floppy disc.
My apologies to all.
I posted the above in the wrong mail list. Mea culpa.
However, check if this may still apply to you in your OS.
In some respects I can understand. I haven't had a floppy drive in any computer I own for close to 10 years now. Despite your current need for it, it really is obsolete technology to the vast majority :-( If you go to the local big computer shop.. finding a pre-built computer with a floppy drive - while still possible in some areas - really is a challenge.
I'm already at the same point now with my DVD drive. Only one computer I have has one, and on the next update it'll probably be removed. To me and many others, DVDs are on the edge of obsolete... just like floppy drives were 10 years ago.
Most of the motherboard manufacturers have been supplying bootable CD ISOs of their flashing software for several years now... does the manufacturer for the board you're working with do the same?
C.
I routinely run "floppy only" bios flashers from usb sticks and from pxe, using syslinux's memdisk and freedos. It's a little exotic at the moment but doable, for free, and it will certainly only get easier and more common, just as booting/installing from usb at all was a short while ago. The point is there are options and ways and there is really no problem. As someone else pointed out, It's essentially no different than any other obsolete technology such as 8" floppies. Get your stuff copied off of it while hardware is still at hand to do so. Simple as that. Is it annoying that stuff keeps changing? Sure. Is it more or less annoying than life would be if stuff didn't change? Installing, AutoCAD, Windows, OS/2, Unix, etc.. from stacks of 12, 20, 50 floppies was certainly quite annoying. I'll take the annoying change thank you. It doesn't bother me in the slightest that they don't even offer a possibility to install Win7 from floppies and it pleases me immensely that you can download Win7 from the internet onto a usb thumb drive and then boot & install right from it. I no longer have 5.25" floppies, nor the Apple ][e I used them in, nor the Quicken 1.0 for Apple][ that was on one of them, nor the special apple serial DIN connector cable or the printer it connected to. I don't miss any of it in any _real_ way other than simple nostalgia. More to the point, I didn't care even before they stopped manufacturing that stuff, let alone years afterward. If I did till have that stuff, I might _amuse_ myself trying to run linux or netbsd on it, but in reality, I would not expect anything to run on it other than the stuff that originally ran on it. This is easy math. -- bkw -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org
On Friday 24 Sep 2010, Brian K. White wrote:
I routinely run "floppy only" bios flashers from usb sticks and from pxe, using syslinux's memdisk and freedos. It's a little exotic at the
Can you point us to some info for this? I've got several floppy-less machines which could benefit from BIOS updates ... Cheers -- " '... but there is so much else behind what I say. It makes itself known to me so slowly, so incompletely! ...' " -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org
On 09/24/2010 11:27 AM, Dylan wrote:
On Friday 24 Sep 2010, Brian K. White wrote:
I routinely run "floppy only" bios flashers from usb sticks and from pxe, using syslinux's memdisk and freedos. It's a little exotic at the Can you point us to some info for this? I've got several floppy-less machines which could benefit from BIOS updates ...
This reminds me of an adventure I had two years ago with a Hewlett Packard desktop. I purchased it with "real" money (mine, not my employer's) and the first thing I did was blow Vista completely away to install openSuSE. It might have been 11.1. I had a couple of issues, first with Reiserfs (known bug), then the on-board Ethernet controller (Realtek RTL8111/8168B). I dropped Reiserfs, but the Ethernet issue remained. I thought I'd flash the mobo in the hope it would fix the problem. Alas, HP requires their flash package run from Vista!. Of course, there were no Vista disks included with the desktop. To HP's credit, I ordered the Vista install disks from their web site for $25 and had them in-hand within one day. The flash went smoothly, but didn't fix the problem with openSuSE. The problem was eventually traced to a bug with the Realtek firmware that was fixed in the newer kernel. I just purchased a PCI-X interface as a workaround. Regards, Lew -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org
On 9/24/2010 2:27 PM, Dylan wrote:
On Friday 24 Sep 2010, Brian K. White wrote:
I routinely run "floppy only" bios flashers from usb sticks and from pxe, using syslinux's memdisk and freedos. It's a little exotic at the
Can you point us to some info for this? I've got several floppy-less machines which could benefit from BIOS updates ...
Cheers
Two main things I do, each for different needs. One is create a special kind of freedos usb stick where freedos is installed on the stick as if the stick is a C: hard drive. This gets you two things, you can boot dos from usb, and you have really convenient access to at least several hundred megs of space without having to worry about mounting 1.44 or 2.88 meg disk images. Once you create the basic freedos install (which is a tedious pain in the neck) after that you can really conveniently copy bios flasher utils on & off the disk in regular subdirectories from linux or windows. And of course unlike PXE booting you can carry a thumb drive around and use it any time anywhere. ...Haha, well it WAS a fat pain in the rear to make these but it looks like I finally got sick of doing it and scripted it up the last time, so the script serves as both automation and documentation. I would read it and do the same steps manually rather than just run it. For one thing I'd grab the latest makebootfat and syslinux not the particular versions in the script. But the freedos files are specific, don't deviate, at least not until after you have proved the concept once using these _exact_ files. This requires a later, specially modified freedos kernel. There is another way to do this which is load up qemu or kvm with a freedos install iso image and direct access to /dev/sd<thumb drive letter> and run the native freedos install to hard drive partitioner/installer. it's slow as _hell_, but one neat thing is it gives you an interesting dos bootloader menu (not lilo or grub or syslinux, something of it's own whose name I forget.) It takes forever though even with a 256M stick let alone 1G. This way is very fast. It boots directly into freedos, no bootloader menu. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- #!/bin/sh # make a bootable freedos usb stick for bios-flashing # Brian K. White - brian@aljex.com echo "This will create a usb stick that boots FreeDOS" echo "and accesses the full usb stick directly as C:" echo "(not by loading a floppy disk image in ram)" echo "Press [Enter] to proceed: " mkdir -p /opt/freedos_usb cd /opt/freedos_usb wget http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/advancemame/makebootfat-1.4.tar.gz?downlo... tar xvzf makebootfat-1.4.tar.gz cd makebootfat-1.4 ./configure make cd .. mv makebootfat-1.4/makebootfat . rm -rf makebootfat-* wget http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/distributions/1.0/pkgs/{commandx,unstablx,kernels}.zip unzip -j commandx.zip bin/command.com unzip -j unstablx.zip bin/kernel.sys unzip -j kernels.zip source/ukernel/boot/fat{12,16,32lba}.bin wget http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/boot/syslinux/syslinux-3.86.zip unzip -j syslinux-3.86.zip mbr/mbr.bin rm *.zip echo echo "Now determine the usb device" echo "(tail -f /var/log/messages, then plug in usb stick)" echo echo "and then if that showed /dev/sdj for example," echo "run this (including final dot):" echo echo "./makebootfat -o /dev/sdj -L FREEDOS -E 255 -1 fat12.bin -2 fat16.bin -3 fat32lba.bin -m mbr.bin ." -------------------------------------------------------------------------- The other thing I do is just take a vendor-supplied bootable floppy image, stick it in /tftpboot somewhere and load it using pxelinux and memdisk, both part of the syslinux package. Sometimes the vendor doesn't supply a bootable floppy just the dos utils alone, or they supply a separate boot floppy because the utils can't fit on the same floppy with the boot files. In that case you can take a 2.88M freedos floppy image which you can download pre-made, loopback mount it in linux to remove the uneeded stuff and free as much room as possible, loopback mount a bios flasher disk image or unpack the .zip or .exe, (or sometimes a .exe is windows-only self extractor that will unpack to a floppy image and a windows rawwrite util, just run it in WINE and let it extract or even install itself, then copy the important bits from your ~/.wine/...) copy the bios flasher stuff to the freedos image, umount the loopback mount(s), then use syslinux & memdisk to boot the dos image from pxe or usb. The advantage here is it's easy to do via pxe so you can do it with no media at all, just some neighboring machine that you can configure to run dhcpd and tftp to serve the stuff to the rebooting machine. You can also just use the floppy image provided by the vendor without modification sometimes if it happens to all be on one floppy. The main reason I use the 2.8M freedos image is because either the vendor does not supply a bootable floppy but just the dos utils in a zip, or the bios flasher and payload are too big to fit on a single floppy with the necessary boot files so they expect you to boot one floppy and then insert one or more other floppies afterwards, which you can't do if you booted a disk image into ram over the network. The only secret sauce for this one, (not counting setting up a working pxe server which is a whole topic of it's own and beyond the scope of this email) is just a known working pxelinux or syslinux config example. First I have several bootable dos floppy images in /tftpboot/dos/* Example, /tftpboot/dos/lsi.img is a freedos 2.8M image with a firmware updater for some LSI raid cards. /tftpboot/dos/x7dbn.img has a bios update for Supermicro X7DBN motherboards etc... /tftpboot/pxelinux.cfg/default is a pxelinux config/menu file that has ------------------------------------------------ default menu.c32 prompt 0 timeout 300 ONTIMEOUT local MENU TITLE Main Menu LABEL local MENU LABEL Boot local hard drive LOCALBOOT 0 LABEL x86 MENU LABEL i386 Installers KERNEL menu.c32 APPEND pxelinux.cfg/i386.menu LABEL x86_64 MENU LABEL x86_64 Installers KERNEL menu.c32 APPEND pxelinux.cfg/x86_64.menu LABEL dos MENU LABEL DOS (BIOS/firmware updaters) KERNEL menu.c32 APPEND pxelinux.cfg/dos.menu ----------------------------------------------- That menu is what machines see when they first boot on my lan, if they boot from lan. If you just press enter, or don't touch any keys for 30 seconds your machine tries to boot from whatever your bios says comes next (not necessarily a hd despite the menu label wording) If you select "DOS (BIOS/firmware updaters)" it loads the file /tftpboot/pxelinux.cfg/dos.menu which is this: --------------------------------------- MENU TITLE DOS (BIOS/firmware updaters) Menu LABEL Main Menu MENU LABEL Main Menu KERNEL menu.c32 APPEND pxelinux.cfg/default LABEL biosflash MENU LABEL Generic FreeDOS w/ various BIOS flash utils KERNEL memdisk APPEND initrd=dos/biosflash.img LABEL pe1550 MENU LABEL Dell PowerEdge 1550 KERNEL memdisk APPEND initrd=dos/pe1550.img LABEL x7dbn MENU LABEL SuperMicro X7DBN KERNEL memdisk APPEND initrd=dos/x7dbn.img LABEL SE7520AF2 MENU LABEL Intel SE7520AF2 KERNEL memdisk APPEND initrd=dos/SE7520AF2_BIOS_P12/disk.img LABEL adaptec MENU LABEL Adaptec 4000 KERNEL memdisk APPEND initrd=dos/adaptec.img LABEL lsi MENU LABEL LSI KERNEL memdisk APPEND initrd=dos/lsi.img ----------------------------------------------------------- Then if you select any of these, the indicated disk image file is loaded and booted. ie: /tftpboot/dos/x7dbn.img In most cases, I find that I have to disable all forms of emm/xmm memory drivers from config.sys (or whatever freedos calls it's equivalent). There are a few options that can be used on the APPEND line to alter the function of memdisk but I never got a handle on exactly why or when or how you might want them. Above works in most cases. I would love to be able to boot a several hundred meg, or even 64 or 32 meg freedos hard drive images with memdisk but I never got that to work, only with floppy images and those max out at 2.88 meg. I no longer know where this stuff came from originally other than googling "Freedos usb" "freedos ramdisk" and "freedos pxe" etc... and following a spiderweb of links and rejecting most of them as crappy things that various people managed to cobble together, or crappy answesr because they relied on proprietary things like a special utility HP once made to make bootable usb sticks and a special scsi emulation usb mass storage driver for dos that adaptec or iomega once made for a zip drive and it's in one particular installer somewhere... ...ah yeah, google "freedos usb" and the very first link shows all the crappy ways, http://genetikayos.livejournal.com/43998.html But right there near the bottom a commenter provides a link to the "good but tedious" way http://rugxulo.googlepages.com/ And my script above is a distillation of that since there is a lot of excess info there and it's not clear how it all relates without slogging through and looking at every link. -- bkw -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org
On 9/24/2010 3:10 AM, C wrote:
On Fri, Sep 24, 2010 at 08:33, Basil Chupin wrote:
I'm already at the same point now with my DVD drive. Only one computer I have has one, and on the next update it'll probably be removed. To me and many others, DVDs are on the edge of obsolete... just like floppy drives were 10 years ago.
Most of the motherboard manufacturers have been supplying bootable CD ISOs of their flashing software for several years now... does the manufacturer for the board you're working with do the same?
C.
What are they going to replace DVD's with? BluRay? (I'm not sure you can write to a BR disk, can you?) Re: floppy disks: as long as WINE is available, some folks will want to be able to access floppies. --doug -- Blessed are the peacemakers...for they shall be shot at from both sides. --A.M. Greeley -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org
participants (9)
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Basil Chupin -
Brian K. White -
C -
Doug -
Dylan -
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Larry Stotler -
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sc