>On Sun, 23 Aug 2015 23:04:46 -0700 >Paul Rogers <[email protected]> wrote: > > In the past I've always had good luck keeping a Live Knoppix CD/DVD > around for the inevitable virgin box I want to talk. Today I found a > "new" version Knoppix-7.2 CD, burned it, booted it in this box to > check. OK. A few hours later I booted my regular (B)LFS-7.2/POD-4.0, > and the onboard NIC was gone. lspci didn't find it. Tried an older > system that hasn't been played with. No NIC. Eventually I went > under the covers and did a hard CMOS reset, and it magically > reapeared. (Obviously) Back in the day I had DOS programs that could > save/restore CMOS'. Is there anything like that for Linux? I've > generally had Plug-n-Play OS enabled in the BIOS. Was that a > mistake? I figured Linux would take control of the HW anyway. Is > Debian/Knoppix a "bad actor" now?
Interesting. Some years back, I wanted to replace the BIOS in my box. I also had some hardware troubles, in my case HDD related, and wanted to get a copy to examine. I used the motherboard manufacturers tool which was supposed to be able to read BIOS from its chip. Unfortunately, I didn't succeed. I did however figure out you could use FreeDOS for all things DOS-related. If you still have those DOS tools around, you could use FreeDOS with them. If I remember correctly, the BIOS' storage medium lies on some "other" bus and is difficult to get to. So, it's not on PCI or something like that. I also seem to remember that some motherboards are more amenable to these attempts are some are less. If you are able to get to it theoretically, you would still need some specialized tools and maybe strange (that is, less used) kernel modules/drivers. -- You don't need an AI for a robot uprising. Humans will do just fine. -- http://lists.linuxfromscratch.org/listinfo/blfs-support FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/faq.html Unsubscribe: See the above information page
