On Aug 25, 2005, at 04:05 PM, Sid Boyce wrote:
Mike Coan wrote:
As someone has mentioned, it is possible to create a bootable DOS CD. To this CD you can add the DOS utility for flashing the Bios, plus the updated Bios. i would start by entering flashing bios linux in Google. Lots of sites will come up. Below is a link I found helpful, but there are others as well. http://www.nenie.org/misc/flashbootcd.html In any event, I have a Linux machine with no floppy and no windows, and I updated the Bios with no problem. One thing i would mention, is that after I falshed the Bios the machine wouldn't Post. i had to move a jumper on the motherboard to clear the CMOS, and then the machine booted with the updated Bios. don't know if this will apply to your motherboard. Mine is an ECS KN1 Extreme. So don't despair if after flashing the Bios the machine just beeps. Mike
In my case, this was not possible because the files I needed made the image much larger than could fit on a floppy, over 5M -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1474560 2005-08-04 22:53 win98-boot.img
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 5165056 2005-08-05 01:13 /ISO/win98.iso
First I'd like to thank Graham for the link to the freedos page and Mike for the link to nenie.org. Thanks Graham! Thanks Mike! :) With those I was able to come up with something substantially(*) similar to the following procedure. I post it as a reply to Sid's message because it allows more room for your files than a floppy image. No sense trying to wrangle room from the 1.4M on the floppy boot image when 90%+ of the space on the CD is going unused! 1) download both the freedos CD iso and the floppy image from the freedos.org site 2) mkdir old 3) mount -o loop freedos.iso old/ 4) mkdir new && cd new 5) tar -zcf ../for_next_time.tgz . 6) cd .. && umount old && rm -rf old 7) mkdir new && cd new 8) tar -zxf ../for_next_time.tgz 9) unzip ../sn95s3x7.zip 10) cp ../freedos.img ../awdflash.exe ../sn95s3x7.bin ./ 11) mkisofs -r -b freedos.img -c boot.cat -o ../boot.iso . 12) cdrecord dev=ATA:1,0,0 ../boot.iso 13) reboot notes: - (*)This is from memory & some scribbled notes since I'm not at the system right now. It should be pretty close though. - I did it this way because I could not figure out how to mount the iso image read/write (so I could just add the 2 files I needed). This may be simply due to me doing this as I was rushing around getting ready for work this morning. If anyone knows a better way, please speak up! It would save a couple steps here. - The "sn95s3x7.zip" is the file I downloaded from my motherboard's manufacturer. It contains the flash utility "awdflash.exe" and the BIOS image "sn95s3x7.bin". - "freedos.img" is the floppy image from freedos.org. It was called something else I'm sure. - likewise, "freedos.iso" is the ISO for the freedos.org CD. - I tried just making an ISO from the boot floppy, but I think it broke some dependancy that caused the freedos cdrom driver to not be loaded because I could not find the flash utility or the BIOS image when I booted from a CD created that way. The only drive that seemed to be accessible was "A:", which just contained the files in the floppy image. - when you boot from the cd, you'll be in a menu system that is designed to help you install freedos on your HD, so BE CAREFUL. Read the menus. I kept pressing "1" until I got to a page that let me drop to DOS. - Once I found the DOS prompt, I found the awdflash.exe and the BIOS image on the X: drive. Odd, but it worked.. .. well kinda. The awdflash utility did run, but it claims that the BIOS file is "not an Award BIOS", and quits. Also, there's supposed to be a feature built in to the utility to compute the checksum of the BIOS image and presumably let you compare it to the cksum listed on the MB maker's web site. Unfortunately the utility just kept saying "not an Award BIOS" and quitting no matter what I did. Anyway, none of that's a linux issue, so I'll take it up with the MB maker via email (the .zip file was one I dl-ed off their ftp site.. guess QA is not a priority with these people). Thanks to everyone who made suggestions. If anyone can simplify the above procedure, please feel free. Future Googlers will no doubt thank you. :) -John