Re: flash replacing hard disks?

On Wed, 05 Oct 2005 00:43:06 -0400, Tony Hill
<hilla_nospam_20@xxxxxxxx> wrote:

>On 4 Oct 2005 11:31:08 -0700, "YKhan" <yjkhan@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>>I'm going through that problem right now on a friend's computer. Trying
>>to burn a CD-RW to flash a BIOS. It looks like Nero 6 now has a
>>pre-packaged version of DR-DOS included now, that can even read NTFS
>>partitions. However, all of that user-friendliness results in a DOS
>>environment with only 396KB memory available to it. That results in a
>>not-enough memory error (ironic these days, considering he's got 1GB of
>>memory installed).
>>
>>We can't even edit the autoexec or config.sys because that environment
>>is put into a section of the CD that is inaccessible by the writer
>>software.
>
>Might I recommend www.bootdisk.com. They have several .iso images of
>DOS bootable CDs, one of which is specifically intended for flashing a
>motherboard BIOS. All you need to do is edit the .iso to add in the
>flashing program as well as the latest BIOS and then burn away.
>
>Of course, really this is something that motherboard companies SHOULD
>be doing for you. I know of some situations where this can be done
>(one that jumps to mind are HP business computers, all of the new ones
>have the option to make an .iso image to update the BIOS or even an
>image to write to a bootable USB key drive). Sadly most companies
>seem to only offer two options, DOS boot floppy or a Windows update
>utility. While the latter works fine on my main machine that
>dual-boots Linux and Windows, it's rather less functional on my PVR
>system that is Linux-only.
>
>>We then tried to install a real floppy drive but we found all floppies
>>we had available to be non-operational.
>
>Been there, done that. If by some strange chance I managed to find a
>floppy drive that worked the media had about a 75% failure rate at
>best. Floppy drives day is LONG gone IMO, and good riddance!
>
>-------------
>Tony Hill
>hilla <underscore> 20 <at> yahoo <dot> ca

Might help for BIOS flash. But when you try installing NT/2k/XP/2k3
on a SATA/SCSI drive you have no chance to substitute CD for a floppy.
The installation is looking for the driver in A:\, and no option to
redirect it to D:\ or E:\ or whatever. Will anybody ever come up with
a flash memory reader that connects through floppy cable? I've seen
floppy/universal flash card reader combos, but for flash reader being
operational it had to connect to USB. Agree that the floppy interface
is sloooooooow, but this is where A:\ connects. Or any option in BIOS
to map A:\ to USB interface?
.

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