Finding BIOS Upgrades?

Posted by Cliff on Tuesday July 23, 2002 @02:07PM from the usful-tidbits-to-know dept.

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."

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Two alternate solutions by inkfox · 2002-07-23 15:21 · Score: 5, Interesting

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.

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Says the RIAA: When you EQ, you're stealing bass!