Is your laptop SATA based internally or EIDE based? If you are EIDE
based, you are actually in great shape. All is not lost either if you
aren't EIDE based. Can you get away with something like a ReactOS
0.4.13 live CD to sort of give you Windows long enough to run the EXE
and upgrade your BIOS? Barring that, you might be able to use a USB
floppy drive, though probably this isn't recommended over just using a
USB thumb drive or an external CF card adapter through a USB port.
Burning a CD-R is probably your best option here where a Linux system
should work just fine for that. Has DELL ever considered supporting
through the BIOS directly a way to read an image and update it without
even introducing an OS on this old laptop? Most modern motherboards
support OS'less updating of the firmware, there isn't BIOS anymore,
but it sounds like your old Dell is old enough that it doesn't. The
lack of virtualization capability suggests you might be running a 32
bit processor and possibly not even a multi core one, which sounds
really cool honestly! I totally sense that Jim and others are under
evaluating the value of older hardware and I am concerned that there
isn't enough emphasis on dual tracking FreeDOS so that you can deploy
it equally well on an 8086, 286, or 386 processor as you can on an AMD
Athlon FX Black 8350 8 core processor or an i5/i7/i9 processor for
that matter. It's the motherboard and the lack of BIOS on it that gets
people in trouble the most these days. That, and there isn't a solid
open source hypervisor to make a modern PC look more ancient so that
FreeDOS will trivially run on it. BIOS can be faked after all.
Worst case scenario, it sounds like DELL is expecting you to be
running Windows 2000 Professional at most where you can temporarily
run that
illegally without having to worry about activation. Just don't keep it
around for very long and avoid networking it. I cannot provide a link
to download Windows 2000 Professional here, but even Windows 98SE
might work where you may just need a 98se boot disk which can be
burned to a CD-R with your bios update program and the update
added to it. Does the EXE file require Win16, Win32K, or something
newer
than that from Windows NT? If it requires MSDOS only, you don't need
Windows at all where you should be able to illegally run MSDOS 6.22
long enough to get your laptop updates. I wonder if DOSBOX can be used
to
bypass the fact that you can't run FreeDOS natively on this laptop?
Can
BIOS updates be done from within DOSBOX running on top of Linux?
-----------------------------------------From: "Stephanos"
To: freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net
Cc:
Sent: Friday April 9 2021 6:22:06AM
Subject: [Freedos-user] Using a USB stick and an optical drive
Dear All
I have an unusual situation. My Dell laptop has Linux on it, I want
to
use VirtuaBox (a tool I have used many times before on other laptops
and
PCs) but the BIOS does not support Virtualisation. An upgrade to the
BIOS might so I want to upgrade the BIOS. Dell supply the BIOS
upgrade
in the form of an .EXE file. If I had Windows on the laptop I could
just execute the file and follow instructions, says Dell.
The laptop does not have a floppy drive. It has two USB ports and an
optical drive. Using my PC I am intending to do the following:
1) Download one of the ISO files
2) Make a CD bootable
3) Write my BIOS upgrade file to the memory stick
Then insert the CD into the laptop and
a) boot the laptop into DOS
b) Insert the memory stick and navigate to the memory stick (by
trying
all the drive letters possible: A:, B: C: D: etc)
c) Execute the BIOS upgrade file
d) Pray
I know how to use a burning programme to burn an ISO onto a disc and
so
make the disc bootable
So, can it be done with one of those ISO files you have on your
website,
and if so, which one?
Thanks and wait to hear
Stephanos, London, UK
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