The boring rants of a lazy nerd

Saturday, July 28, 2007

Too New Hardware

Ah, hardware so new Knoppix doesn't support it. Glorious!

BIOS that came on the motherboard if the first release version, 0201. Doesn't recognize the E6550 so complains about being unable to load microcode. Also BIOS updates are very important. So that should be addressed first.

The BIOS image is 2MB so doesn't fit 1.44 floppy (connecting the floppy drive was a bitch!). Have to flash it using either a USB mass storage device (which I don't have handy) and the BIOS built-in flasher or through Windows-based flasher (but no Windows live-cd here either) or by burning an ISO CD image with FreeDOS, the ASUS DOS flasher and the unzipped BIOS image itself to a CDRW and booting off that.

But can't burn a CD if booted from the burner, so attach the trusty old Toshiba SD-M1402 to the sole IDE port, enable JMicron IDE controller in BIOS (on by default), boot into Knoppix from the PATA drive. Find out SATA drive is not recognized by Knoppix 5.1.1 (Linux 2.6.19) when set to IDE mode in BIOS. Only when set to AHCI in BIOS will it get recognized. Ubuntu 7.04 install disk (Linux 2.6.20) does recognize the drive in IDE mode, so that is fixed already. Create proper CD image using fdos builder template and gleaning the right mkisofs command line parameters from the WinNT batch files, burn image in K3B. Again, the ASUS SATA DVD drive won't boot off the CD, so boot off the PATA drive, type afuflash /i0503.rom in DOS, wait a while thinking "I knew I should've bought a UPS!" and voilĂ , new BIOS.

Still can't overclock without lm-sensors working, and for that need new kernel.

Still don't know how to flash the optical drive without running RedmondOS.

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