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Finding BIOS Upgrades?
CrazyDwarf asks: "I dug up and old system that my company was about to toss in the dumpster and decided to load Linux on it. My problem: the BIOS will not recognize more than 500 MB of the HDD. I don't have a CD-ROM for this PC. I was looking for a BIOS upgrade download, but AWARD wants me to buy it from some third party. If I could afford to buy it from them, I wouldn't be doing all this, I'd just get a CD-Rom and move on. Where are some good places for me to go find a free (no cost) download to upgrade my BIOS? I have been searching for an hour on Google and have not really found anything."
1 - Search Google for your complete mbd model# (in quotes if there's any dashes in it)
2 - Somewhere in the search results there will be a link or reference to an appropriate file.
3 - Try to download the file; if you can't then do another search using just that filename (in quotes again).
This has always worked for me.
(Aaack! I just replied to an "Ask Slashdot" and told them to use Google!
And here I swore I'd never reply to another troll...)
As some other posters have pointed out, you don't need to have BIOS-level access to the entire hard drive to get the machine to boot properly and run Linux. Just keep the bootable partition within the first 500 megs, and all is dandy.
However, you might want to use a BIOS overlay, anyway. Makes things easier, and lets you do stuff like run ancient DOS games on the hardware they were meant for, or fire up OS/2 Warp for an old-school look at the future.
On my 386SL-25 laptop, I'm using IBM's overlay software, which is freely downloadable as a bootable floppy disk image. Most other manufacturers also supply overlay software, free, but it generally requires you to install it on a machine with a drive of the same make; Maxtor's software needs to see a Maxtor drive somewhere in the system, or it will simply refuse to cooperate.
This works fine with Linux, and has for a very long time. It just recognizes that the drive was partitioned with overlay software, and does the same sector translation on its own.
I doubt there's even a speed hit.
I used IBM's software because I have a bunch of their SCSI disks in the machine I was borrowing to do the Linux install with, and Hitachi stands almost alone as a vendor who doesn't supply overlay software of their own. (the laptop, sadly, has no floppy drive, CD-ROM, or other external storage, so I spent most of an evening swapping IDE cables trying to get the thing to boot.)
Kid-proof tablet..