On Tue, 18 Jan 2005 10:53:52 -0800, Starren, Erick E CIV <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > My first attempt was to copy the extractor > > to a FREEDOS floppy, and boot that. I could > > run it but it wanted to write to drive B: which > > I don't have one of. Not sure whether I could > > have removed the "system" floppy from A: and put > > in a blank and gone from there. > > This would probably work. Ever since the early > 80's DOS would recognize that a reference to B: > on a one-floppy system required swapping diskettes. > So a command like "copy xxx B:" would produce a > prompt like "Please insert destination disk in B:". > Meaning, of course, the only floppy drive available. > DOS would "remember" that the diskette is now the > "B:". The next time it wanted the "A:", it would > prompt for it in similar fashion.
This didn't work for me because apparently the program wanted to read some more from the original A: probably to extract the stuff that it was going to write out. However what did work was to create a very minimal DR-DOS system followed by a large file of zeroes to fill up most of the rest of the floppy, followed by the extractor program. When I booted that on the laptop and ran the extractor, it merrily overwrote all of the original system stuff and then created the necessary files to do the BIOS update, and then crashed because it couldn't return to its original OS. > Try it. DOS is not running here, so if the BIOS > does not handle the diskette swap, try DOSEMU in > Linux and see what that does. I must be making up for a lifetime of ignoring PC DOS. I downloaded DOSEMU, browsed through about 40 pages of README and HOWTO, and felt fairly confused. Google tells me that there was once a Dosemu QuickStart document, but it seems not to exist any more. However, I did eventually find a really short explanation of how to do simple things. < http://www.preshweb.co.uk/linux/howtos/dos/ > And I did the simple things, ran the BIOS updater unpacker, and created yet another floppy disk. So I have three identical floppies, created through three different routes. 1) boot minimum system on the target laptop drive A:, overwrite it using the unpacker. 2) run WINE on the auxiliary desktop computer, write to mounted /dev/floppy 3) run DOSEMU on the desktop computer, write to drive A: DOSEMU was the easiest, as it turns out. There is definitely more than one way to do it. Next time I am feeling daring, I will actually use the BIOS updater. carl -- carl lowenstein marine physical lab u.c. san diego [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- KPLUG-List mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
