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."

Comments

Openbios might be tha ticket

[Cardhore]

OpenBIOS might work on your board.

OpenBIOS will be a free portable firmware implementation. The goal is to implement a 100% IEEE 1275-1994 (Referred to as Open Firmware) compliant firmware. Among it's features, Open Firmware provides an instruction set independent device interface. This can be used to boot the operating system from expansion cards without any native binary code. Thus it is OpenBIOS' goal to work on all common platforms, like x86, Alpha, x86-64 and IA-64. Additionally OpenBIOS targets the embedded systems sector, where a sane and unified firmware is a crucial design goal. Open Firmware is found on many servers and workstations and there are several commercial implementations from SUN, Apple, IBM, CodeGen and others. More information on OpenBIOS is available on the About OpenBIOS page

Two alternate solutions

[inkfox]

Firstly, you can just boot off a floppy. The BIOS doesn't need to understand the drive, so long as the kernel does.

Secondly, you can likely boot off the drive if you go into the BIOS configuration and manually specify the correct number of heads and cylinders/sectors and just fib about the number of tracks. If you boot Linux from a small boot partition at the start of the drive, you're likely just fine.

Re:How old?

[Pogue Mahone]

The old MoBos used to have socketed EPROMS for the BIOS - quite easy to replace, as long as you have a programmer. But buy a new device, so that if all goes pear-shaped you can plug the old one back in. Anyway, you don't need your BIOS to recognise more than 500MB. Simply make a small partition (10MB should be enough) at the start of the disk, and put your kernel etc. there. Mount it as /boot. That should work with most good distros. Apart from boot time, a Linux system doesn't need the BIOS. The only exception to this BIOS problem that I know of is with some old caching disk controllers. I have one that has a 2048-cylinder hard limit in the controller, which limits the disk size to about 1 GB. But that was in an absolutely ancient (ca. 10 years old) 486i - all ISA.