Re: OpenBIOS (was Re: UDI and Politics (was Re: Linux, UDI and SCO.) )

Gerhard Mack (gmack@imag.net)
Sun, 20 Sep 1998 15:55:24 -0700 (PDT)


On Sun, 20 Sep 1998, Adam Sulmicki wrote:
[snip]
> This actually makes me wonder what do I really want.
>
> My inital dismay from the BIOS came after I got new computer to be
> the server. It was just MB/CPU/Ram/HDD. no floppy, no cdrom. I also
> don't have eprom for nic (to make it netbootable).
>
> Problem 1: took hdd to other computer and installed Linux there.
> Putting it back, it comes out this bios insist to use CHS
> instead of LBA like other did, so no go. Few other tries
> but still no go. If I use LBA with the 'server' MB it will
> declare my hdd to be 528mb (instead of 8.6gb) and confuse LILO.
> Bad BIOS, bad.

This is how I set up my drive:
I turned off any form of translation in the
cmos, 5 meg at the beginning mounted as /boot the rest is partitioned as
normal, linux loves it lilo is happy. no problem.

I do this because some systems seem to have buggy bioses that slow the hd
if translation is enebled. (ipc notebooks with bios serial numbers listed
as "evaluation" on the AMI website to name one off hand

dunno about the rest.

Gerhard

> Problem 2: I have an 3.5 floppy. I did attach it in the middle of cable
> (ie as "B") and try booting. Two bugs this time: a) BIOS
> allows you to boot off it only if you cfg it as "B", the
> 'swap floppy' does not work. b) Red Hat assumes that you boot
> off A) drive (fd0) so even if you boot off fd1, it still will
> want supplementary floppy in df0 even if there is no such device.
> Bad BIOS, bad.
> I ended up putting Debian which was smart enough to ask each time
> what device I want to use. (I did not have Linux bootable CD's)
> Problem 3:
> It is ATX mb. Thus by default if power goes out and comes back it
> stays off (unlike BAT mb). I'm told there is setting in bios
> (APM section) to change that. My bios does not have this option.
> Bad BIOS, bad.
>
> Adam
>

--
Gerhard Mack
irc-admin skyline.starchat.net
	
gmack@imag.net
InnerFIRE@starchat.net

As a computer I find your faith in technology amusing.

- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/