Re: NTP broken with 2.6.14

From: Jean-Christian de Rivaz
Date: Mon Nov 07 2005 - 16:44:40 EST


Hans-Peter Jansen a écrit :
Am Freitag, 4. November 2005 03:50 schrieb Jean-Christian de Rivaz:

After trying several time, I am unable to upgrade the BIOS of this
machine. The flash utility hang all the system at the very beginning
of the real access to programm the flash! This is maybe because I use
a freedos image over pxelinux. I will try with a floppy and a MSDOS
if I found such olds stuffs somehere.


Could very well be the netboot stuff. I typically flash BIOS/firmware via DOS network boot images, which provides at least two different ways of disk emulation: a: and c:, but some flash tools just freeze the system on load/image load in both ways. Most prominently is the Promise TX2/100 firmware update, but also a couple of motherboards BIOS' flashers behave that way (cannot remember which ones, though).

As you can see in my two latest post, I finnaly found that this was not the good BIOS for the motherborad. When I understand my mistake, I take the good BIOS version and I was able to flash it with FreeDOS over PXE network boot. So the netboot stuff was not the problem in my case.

The funny part is that with my motherboard, if you try to flash the wrong BIOS version you don't get any clear message agains this opearation. But this ended randomly into one of the following posibility:
1) system simply hang.
2) "division by zero error".
3) "failed opcode "<put some hexadecimal bytes here>.
4) immediate reboot.

I think that the BIOS update is an area where the mainboard makers have a hug possibility to improve there product...

--
Jean-Christian de Rivaz
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