Hi! > Hi. I want to flash new bios to my motherboard. > Is it safe to use freedos instead of msdos for > bios flashing purposes? Are there any problems with this?
Basic answer: The risk is similar in both cases. Avoid emm386 / jemm386 / jemmex / USB drivers, try to boot from something simple (floppy? cdrom/dvd? maybe not USB?) to reduce load on BIOS built-in USB drivers, maybe even use non-USB keyboard/mouse. Actually better avoid mouse drivers for flashing anyway. It might even make sense to avoid HIMEM / HIMEMX as well and use FreeCOM 0.82pl3 command.com instead of 0.84 or 4DOS or other modern shells... Problem with flashing is that your BIOS is in a state of transition. You just boot DOS to get the BIOS update file to the BIOS update tool and then you hope that nothing touches the BIOS or disk or other hardware any more apart from the tool itself. The best way to get this is to have no special drivers (not even BIOS built-in ones) busy and use a tool which does not access DOS while it does the actual modifications. That said, most BIOS flash tools are really simple for any DOS and flashing should be safe enough as long as you keep the number of drivers reasonably low, disable energy saving features (in BIOS and in FDAPM etc) and do not touch (mouse, network, USB, keyboard...) the computer in the critical moment. Eric ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.Net email is sponsored by the Moblin Your Move Developer's challenge Build the coolest Linux based applications with Moblin SDK & win great prizes Grand prize is a trip for two to an Open Source event anywhere in the world http://moblin-contest.org/redirect.php?banner_id=100&url=/ _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
