Re: flash replacing hard disks?

On Thu, 06 Oct 2005 01:19:48 GMT, "nobody@xxxxxxxxxxx"
<mygarbage2000@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

>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!
>>
>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.

Actually the newer nForce3 and nForce4 chipsets, as well as Intel's
i9xx series of chipsets, do not require any special drivers to install
WinXP/Win2K3 at the least. I don't know about WinNT 4.0 (bleah!) or
Win2K, though I suspect they should work fine too. Load up the OS in
a legacy mode that emulates standard IDE then load your drivers within
Windows to get access to the performance features of the SATA drive.

As far as I know it's really only the first generation of SATA
controllers that REQUIRED special drivers before they would work at
all.

-------------
Tony Hill
hilla <underscore> 20 <at> yahoo <dot> ca
.

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