I've been trying to update the BIOS on my wife's Dell Inspiron 17 5721 laptop using FreeDOS. I've tried to do this with FreeDOS 1.0, 1.1, 1.2, and 1.3rc2, each time with the same result.
What happens is this: after setting up FreeDOS on a USB stick using its .img file (and adding the BIOS executable, 3521A16.exe), I can boot without incident into FreeDOS on the laptop. After opting not to continue with the installation, the DOS prompt I'm dropped into seems to be fully functional, i.e., all the builtin commands appear to work normally. When I go to run the BIOS updater by typing the .exe's file name and hitting return, however, the only thing that happens is that the word "Test." is printed to the console. The updater then exits without doing anything else. The updater is what Dell describes as a "Universal (Windows/MS DOS)" application. Even though it appears to the file system as a single .exe file, it is actually a package, containing these files: Ding.wav FlsHook.exe FlsHookDll.dll FWUpdLcl.exe InsydeFlash.exe iscflash.dll iscflash.sys iscflashx64.sys isflash.bin platform.ini xerces-c_2_7.dll Frankly, I don't know enough about DOS to know whether this kind of application structure is normal in a DOS environment. I'm just mentioning it as a possible issue. I've scanned for strings in all of the files of the updater, and did not find a "Test." string, which leaves me with the question of whether "Test." (and the premature installer exit) is coming from FreeDOS. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance!
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