Asking of the impossible...

Ragnarok0mega · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 30 Sep 2004 Posts: 145

allright so, i have a mobo which is basically dying on me. i want to use it as a crap ass server, however it wont boot a gentoo livecd (oddly enough openBSD install cd worked just fine) it also wont read from the floppy drive (tried multiple devices) so i figured i would flash the bios in hopes that it would allow me to boot the live cd, however i cannot use the floppy drive to do so, i tried burning the .rom and .COM files to a cd using

syg00 · Posted: Mon Feb 14, 2005 11:24 am Post subject:

Yuck - don't like you chances.
P'raps go to a weekend market and see if you can find an old "multi-IO" ISA card - I think they handled floppies as well. Shouldn't cost anything; they ought to give them away

Might be your only chance - the flash programs from that era generally needed a boot floppy.

Jake · Veteran Joined: 31 Jul 2003 Posts: 1132

What is "BIOS.IMG"? Is it a DOS bootdisk image that you copied your BIOS image and flashing program to by mounting it as a loopback device? If not, then yeah, it wouldn't be a "system disk" or whatever the error says.

Of course you could just use OpenBSD, but that would be too easy.

A true masochist would install OpenBSD to a small partition, then install GRUB and e2fsprogs from ports/packages. Configure GRUB as the Linux/OpenBSD bootloader. Make an ext2 filesystem and share it over NFS. Mount the share from a Gentoo machine and do an "emerge system" with the ROOT environment variable set to the mount point. Or extract a tarball. It would be the ugliest Gentoo installation ever.

hds · Posted: Mon Feb 14, 2005 1:04 pm Post subject:

not sure if i understand that right, but would this help:
http://colt.projectgamma.com/bios/flashing.html

mirko_3 · l33t Joined: 02 Nov 2003 Posts: 605 Location: Birreria

Boot from Knoppix or even just that bsd cd and install gentoo from there?
_________________
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Ragnarok0mega · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 30 Sep 2004 Posts: 145

yes the BOOT.IMG is a dos image with the two files in it, and OpenBSD was the only OS aside from windows i was able to install on there from disk, the knoppix cd got be to the boot screen of it but about 2 seconds after it would start to boot it would restart the computer, and the gentoo disk just wont even load =/ thus my thought of flashing might update the bios to let it boot. i cant really do anything from an installed os on it because the hd with this box only has about 3gb

hds · Posted: Mon Feb 14, 2005 6:46 pm Post subject:

just a guess.. try SysRecueCD
found here:
http://www.sysresccd.org/download.en.php
check the boot options first! you are able to press F1, F2, F3

there you are able to modify the bootoptions. try without detecting anything.
will this boot up alright?