Hi,

Egbert Eich schrieb:

> I think it would be worthwhile to investigate the origin or the problem
> and report it to Intel to fix it in the BIOS - in case they have broken
> something. It looks like an endless loop to me.

I made some research with a little tool of mine which allows me to load
and use another BIOS than the pre-installed one. (This tool is NOT going
to be released.)
The BIOS dump I got from an Inspiron 510m crashes under DOS, too. This
crash only occurs for CX (device number) 0x01. It's not an endless loop
but a jump to "nowhere". Let me explain: Depending on the device number
the address of the function to call is taken from a table. This fails
for device 1 and isn't properly caught so a jump to the middle of some
other (totally unrelated) function is executed. That obviously leads to
the crash.
BIOS build 3197 (which can be obtained from the Intel web site) doesn't
have that bug. Since the table with the addresses is in the (partially)
user configurable BIOS data block, the missing table entry could also be
a configuration error made by Dell. But as Dell's policy towards Linux
is "we don't support it", chances are low to get a new BIOS asking there.

CU Christian
-- 
Christian Zietz  -  CHZ-Soft  -  [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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