Hello All! I don't know how much of a problem you have when upgrading a motherboard's BIOS. That is an operation you're supposed to do from a bootable DOS floppy or with a Windows utility. That is not a problem if you're running Windows or have a floppy drive and floppies for it.
My Linux box does not have the required floppy drive. Also I run a couple of Linux servers which don't have the drive. And I'd still like to run upgrades when needed. FreeDOS sounds like a solution at least by availability and price, but it does not solve the booting problem. I prepared bootable FreeDOS images to fit on an USB-stick. I took the boot-image (fdboot.img) from FreeDOS full CD and inserted it into the stick with HP's USB utility. There is nothing added or removed. The image is available here: http://opensource.contentbakery.fi/freedos/FreeDOS%201.0%20bare_USB.img.bz2 That is a 512 MiB image with FAT16. It can be inserted into a stick from Linux with command similar to: bzip2 -cd "FreeDOS 1.0 bare_USB.img.bz2" | dd of=/dev/sda bs=1M There is also a full FreeDOS USB-image with all the files: http://opensource.contentbakery.fi/freedos/FreeDOS%201.0_USB.img.bz2 That is simply the full CD arranged to suit an USB-stick. During testing these I noticed that all machines cannot boot all sticks. They should be, but reality seems to bite there. My solution to the BIOS update problem is a slightly modified CD-image. I added the copyrighted Panasonic USB-drivers into a bootable FreeDOS CD. That way you can boot from a CD and have the BIOS files on an USB-stick. The stick will be assigned a drive letter and upgrade files can be accessed there. The ISO-image can be downloaded from: http://opensource.contentbakery.fi/freedos/fdfullcd%20JaTu-version%20w%20USB-drivers.iso.bz2 Feel free to download and do anything you like with those. They're very useful for me. Regards, Jari Turkia ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: Microsoft Defy all challenges. Microsoft(R) Visual Studio 2005. http://clk.atdmt.com/MRT/go/vse0120000070mrt/direct/01/ _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
