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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."
Hmm... depending on how old the system actually is, it might not even HAVE downloadable BIOS updates. IIRC, most 486 systems and even some 586-based systems didn't have Flash ROMs... to upgrade the BIOS, you had to physically replace the BIOS CMOS.
If the motherboard does, indeed, have a flashable BIOS, then try looking up the part/model number on either the manufacturer's site or Google.
- Jester
Boot from floppy.
Your problem is that you can't _boot_ from a HD larger than 500MB -- because as soon as Linux kernel is loaded, BIOS isn't needed any more anyways. All you need to to is load the kernel somehow and all the limitations of BIOS doesn't exist anymore.
Then whatever you've got connected to IDE (zip, cdrom, any HD) will work because Linux kernel is up-to-date with things.
To repeat myself, after Linux kernel is loaded, the kernel takes over. BIOS simply isn't consulted again.
Of course, some other OS's like DOS still accesses disk through BIOS, so DOS wouldn't work.
for hard drives that replaces the bios.
Relevant Search
Old enough, by the sound of things, that running X would likely be painful. You should be able to squeeze a non-GUI install into 500M without too much difficulty. Check out TinyApps for so small distros.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
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...)
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
Got friends?
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.
Says the RIAA: When you EQ, you're stealing bass!
Who says he planned on using KDE or GNOME? I'm running a 486 laptop without X installed, and it's blazingly fast - and very useful. I write papers on it with vim, print from it, connect to the net via links, check my email, and even play the occasional game of nethack.
A slightly beefier system sits to my left - a P75, running Ion, which uses very few system resources. It has X installed, and is quite nice for doing development work.
$200 is still a significant chunk of change - that's two months of food for me, or almost a month's rent, for example. A free system is not something to be turned up - you just don't install the bloatware that most people are clamoring for.
We who were living are now dying
With a little patience
Be sure to try Wim' Bios page Click the award or ami bios id link at the top and you will be directed to a page the can identify the motherboard manifacturer based on the bios id (the string of numbers at the bottom of the screen during post). Armed with that knowledge, you can then go to that companies site and look for your particular board. It has helped me locate bios' for no-name boards many times. As an aside, I don't know much about Asian culture, but it seems to me they must know that some of their products are really crappy and thus don't put their company name anywhere on them. --Mike
It sounds as though you're trying to load the Linux CDs on a big hard drive, hook that drive up to the computer temporarily and load Linux on the machine's hard drive from the bigger drive instead of from a CD-ROM drive which you say the machine doesn't have. Consider temporarily installing a CD drive from some other machine and installing from that or temporarily installing a NIC from some other machine and installing via network.
If I can help you with hard drive questions, get in touch.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
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..
Not unless you like toxic metals in your coffee. Even if it's legal in your locale, it's hardly good citizenship to throw computer hardware into a landfill. If it's beyond use, take it to a recycler. Yes it costs. So does treating cancer.
Where are you living that rent is so high?
I'm paying $625 for a spacious 2-bedroom appartment with a laundry room. Back when I did the roommate thing my rent was never over $300. $1200 would get me a 2- to 4-bedroom house, depending on location. I'm in California, so even that is a bit inflated compared to other parts of the country.
$1200 for a 1-bedroom sounds like Bay Area prices to me. You do know that most of the rest of the country is significantly cheaper, don't you?
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
"dont bother. anything below a p-66 will be painfully slow."
Absolutely 100% NOT true! I am running several systems that are 386 and 486 based. I have one system that is a 386DX-40MHz which is running an email to alphanumeric paging gateway and doing some automated housekeeping on a network and the damn thing hums right along.
I wouldn't want to use X on a 386, that's for sure. And on a 486 I would think twice about it, and run a very lite window manager (not KDE). But then again there are very few reasons to be running X anyway except for a desktop client.
. Quit playing Monopoly with Bill. Switch to one of many non-Microsoft products today.
Also note that some older Pentium's overclock well. I have a P75 that runs reliably at 133MHz. Just make sure you have a big heatsink (Like one for a P200 or similar). That may give you the performance you are looking for.
Chances are good that the vendor never updated the BIOS. Some of us remember the glory days when harddrive size had a BIOS limitation.
You have two options:
1) Buy a replacement BIOS ROM from someone like Mr. BIOS (yes, I said "Mr. BIOS")
2) Use a Dynamic Drive Overlay (DDO). A DDO is a piece of software that is, in effect, a bootstrap virus. It loads code in the bootblock that builds a new drive map at boot time. While BIOS only seens four or five hundred megs, a DDO will get you to the next physical barrier (which, if I'm not mistaken is either 2GB or 4GB).
DDOs were used successfully for a very long time, though I remember avoiding them at the time. They're creepy. Most HD vendors use to offer then for free (WD, Maxtor), you should be able to dig one up on an abandonware site.
"All I ever wanted was to see Larry Wall give Bill Gates a Perl necklace."
http://www.eisenschmidt.org/jweisen
Making the second drive the home directory was as easy as dropping the hard drive in, formatting it with cfdisk, adding a file system with mkext2fs, coppying my files and changing a single line in /etc/fstab and rebooting. Rebooting was optional. It took way less time than fooling around with a bios upgrade that might or might not work. If ever I need another IDE channel, I've got an old 16 bit card that supposedly gives me one, but two devices are enough for me for now.
Yep, the 66MHz 486 is still AOK as an ftp server. No GUI needed, never down for anything but power fails, always chugging along but always quiet. Thank you Debian.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.