Eric Auer schrieb: > Hi Michael, > >> Do BIOS update 100 % step by step as the manual says. No experiments wit >> h DOS versions, TSR's, boot medium (if you shall use legacy floppy then >> do so). Otherwise you risk the BIOS update to fail as the developers did >> not thought about your modified use. > > I agree that unloading TSRs can cause risks, but I would not > overdo the 100% step by step part. Remember that even big > mainboard makers shipped half-broken modifications of FreeDOS > with their products and that for example MS DOS simply is no > longer legally available for normal post-Win9x home users.
I haven't made a comparison of all available manuals but from my experience them recommend to use the "create DOS bootdisk" feature of Windows XP. > >> Ok, well you can experiment if you have the equipment >> to remove the flash chip and to flash it from outside. > > Better BIOSes have various fallback options, such as a second > copy of the BIOS or a part which cannot be flashed which is > able to load update floppies even after a failed BIOS update. I would scare to rely on such wobbly underground. > I personally would say that floppy is best (if you still have > a drive) followed by harddisk, CD/DVD and then USB. Agreed. > You should > avoid loading EMM386 for compatibility reasons Agreed. > but HIMEM should > be safe for most BIOS update tools as far as I remember... I do not see for what it should be needed in this situation. > If > your BIOS USB drivers are not stable, it might help to copy all > relevant files to RAMDISK before updating the BIOS. You could > even BOOT from a RAMDISK, using ISOLINUX / SYSLINUX and MEMDISK. Well, the exact process how legacy BIOS is booting is not fully documented and vary from motherboard to motherboard. BIOS developers done strange things such as hardcoding Win9x boot files. This makes me think that them might have hardcoded the way them allocate memory and using memdisk's memory while it still needs to access the memdisk would result in a crash. If a BIOS updates failes and you used not-100% manual then you do not know if it was because of the not-100% manual or if it would have happened also with following the 100% the manual. Because if the BIOS update failed with a not-100% manual following way then the person does mostly not reproduce the 100% manual following way and reports to public the results, even these results would be only valid for the one motherboard at it's revision. This is because people do not experiment and reproduce with BIOS as often as them do with software because it's risky and needs special tools for recovery. (Even worse with brazed flash rom chips.) Personally I would be glad if there would be "less magic" inside the BIOS, just an sd card with FAT (or other fileformat where open source drivers are available) where you can copy (backup) and exchange the rom file without performing magic and/or Dual BIOS where one is completely static and read-only for recovery purposes while the other one can be used to reproduce things as often as you like. > In general, it is bad if you have to load "fancy" drivers such > as USB, NTFS or network, between booting and flashing... It is > much better if you can put your BIOS update files directly on > the drive where you will boot from, so you need no extra driver. Agreed. -mr ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Apps built with the Adobe(R) Flex(R) framework and Flex Builder(TM) are powering Web 2.0 with engaging, cross-platform capabilities. Quickly and easily build your RIAs with Flex Builder, the Eclipse(TM)based development software that enables intelligent coding and step-through debugging. Download the free 60 day trial. http://p.sf.net/sfu/www-adobe-com _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
