On Sun, 05 Mar 2000, Stefan Bellon wrote:
> > Maybe, maybe not. There might be an updated BIOS available from the
> > company you purchased the notebook from. As for a BIOS from some were
> > else, it depends on the board. BIOS tends to be a very board specific
> > thing. Given that many so called "manufacters" are nothing more than
> > resellers of one companies notebook (with the resellers own label on
> > top) if you know the true maker of your notebook you can try the
> > makers website or the website of a different reseller with the same
> > basic notebook.
>
> Well, I have a Gericom (http://www.gericom.com/) 1100MT notebook. And
> I've installed the latest BIOS that is available for it from their ftp
> site. And - per email - they told me, that it's the latest available.
> Hmmmm.
>
Well, I hate to suggest this but have you considered downgrading your BIOS. I
kind of doubt it would help but its an option.
[snip]
> > OK, now I'm really confused. If you have a DOS MBR and the Windows
> > partition marked active then it boots,
>
> Yes, that's the setup Windows 98 installs, isn't it? And that works ok.
>
> > but if the Linux patition is active then it gives the error?
>
> Yes.
[snip]
> I don't understand why you're confused. If the BIOS checks a checksum
> of the boot sector, then it can do it not just only for the MBR, but
> for the boot sector called from this one as well, as it /expects/ the
> DOS MBR to be there. So it looks at the active boot partitions and
> checks its boot sector as well. I don't see why this couldn't apply
> here.
>
My understanding of the DOS/Windows boot sequence is that the BIOS reads the
MBR, which then loads the first boot sector marked as active, which then loads
the msdos.sys and related files.
+--------+
| MBR | >--+- or -+ depending on which is marked bootable
+--------+ | |
| Partition 1 | <--+ |
| boot sector | >--+ |
+--------+ | |
| data | | |
| | <--+ |
| | |
+--------+ |
| Partition 2 | <-------+
| boot sector | >--+
+--------+ |
| data | <--+
| |
| |
+--------+
When you do a "sys" command in DOS/Windows, it rewrites the boot sector to
point at the msdos.sys file, etc. The DOS MBR is the same across all Microsoft
OSs but the boot sector is unique by the way of different versions and pointing
to different disk locations. My Win98 release 1 reads "MSWIN4.1" were as my DOS
6.0/Win 3.1 reads "MSDOS5.0". If the BIOS was checking the boot sector then any
other Windows version, or upgrade, or even reinstallation would not work
because the boot sector would be different. That's why I'm confused.
[snip]
> > /dev/hda4 830 839 75600 a0 IBM Thinkpad
> > hibernation
> ^^^^^^^^^^^^
> What's that? Some kind of suspend to disk partition?
>
Yes, many notebooks with suspend to disk partions use 0xa0 as the ID. It's not
an IBM specific thing, I think who ever added the patch to fdisk just had an
IBM.
[snip]
> ... A)bort R)etry G)et a stick and kill it.
>
<g> ... <shift>+<g> ... <shift>+<g> <return> ... <G> <G> <G> <G> <G> <G> ...
<G> damnit <G>
Adrian
