After several months of begrudgingly putting up with my ASUS A7V
motherboard corrupting roughly 1 byte per 100 million read during
moderate to heavy PCI bus activity, I flashed VIA's 1009 BIOS this
evening.
I have not been able to reproduce any corruption since then (it was
ridiculously easy before the new BIOS), and my machine seems otherwise
as stable as I would hope. This marks the first time since 2.4.6 that
I've been able to run a Linus kernel without cowering.
I also discovered, of necessity, a halfway manageable process for
creating a DOS boot floppy using Windows ME, which Microsoft would
apparently prefer was not possible. I'll reproduce the steps here,
since otherwise flashing a new BIOS is likely to be nightmarish for
people stuck dual booting into WinME.
Most of these steps occur under Linux, and I'll assume that your Windows
Me "C:" drive is mounted as /dos/c.
- Format a floppy:
fdformat /dev/fd0H1440
- Create a FAT filesystem:
mkdosfs /dev/fd0
- Mount the floppy:
mount /dev/fd0 /mnt
- Copy across a few files:
cp /dos/c/command.com /mnt
cp /dos/c/io.sys /mnt
cp /dos/c/msdos.sys /mnt
- Edit /mnt/msdos.sys, and change values as follows:
[Paths]
WinDir=a:\
WinBootDir=a:\
HostWinBootDrv=a
[Options]
BootMulti=0
BootGUI=0
AutoScan=0
- Copy across your BIOS flash utility (probably aflash.exe) and BIOS
image. Unmount the floppy (important; don't just reboot):
umount /mnt/floppy
- When you reboot to the floppy, it will desperately try to boot into
Windows. When it prompts you for the path to some Windows VXD, just
type "a:\command.com", and lo, you've got a DOS prompt.
Cheers,
<b
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Wed Oct 31 2001 - 21:00:33 EST