FreeDOS 1.0 USB Boot Image
I was trying to update the BIOS of my new SATA controller (a Syba SD-SATA2-4IR, or SD-81012336 – you decide), as the system will not boot with the RAID BIOS, unless you have a logical drive defined. Since this fakeraid is generally garbage, and I’ll be using ZFS as well as gmirror, I thought I would try and work around it.
If you go to the chipset manufacturer’s support page for the Sii3124 chip, you can download a set of BIOSes that will allow you to switch the controller out of RAID mode, and into “IDE mode” (possibly AHCI mode, I haven’t been able to actually test what happens then).
To do this though, ideally I’d like a FreeDOS boot image, because let’s face it – floppies are dead. I still have a bunch, but why?
I followed the “Using Makebootfat on Linux” directions at: http://wiki.fdos.org/Installation/BootDiskCreateUSB, but I found them a little onerous, especially if I need to redo this every time I want to create a custom image. Also, after following the directions, the system would not boot, because the geometry of the drive didn’t match, or something obscure like that. I was greeted with the error: “Bad or missing Command.com Interpreter”. I went into Gparted (0.4.3), and enabled the LBA flag on the partition, and then everything booted up fine (drive geometry is also dead).
You can follow these instructions yourself, or if you prefer something easier, here is an image that you can write directly to the USB drive using dd. I’m not sure what the Windows analog to dd is, perhaps something in cygwin will do:
This is a 31MB image, that is mostly free space, so that should give enough room to fit many different utilities, and also fit on a 32MB USB memory stick.
The image is released under GPLv2, the same as FreeDOS. You can find the sources for all this stuff at the above link.
Now my card boots just fine without any logical drives defined.
I downloaded your boot image and wrote it to a USB stick but it won’t boot.
I see command.com and kernel.sys on the USB drive.
Any ideas?
@Neil Aggarwal
Can you describe exactly how you “wrote it to a USB stick”?
Can you confirm your BIOS settings? What is your boot order? Are you trying to boot to USB-HDD, USB-FDD, or something else?
Do you get any boot-time messages that indicate the boot failed?
I am using dd to write the image to the USB drive.
It must have been the USB drive. I used the exact same procedure to write the image to a different USB stick and it worked perfectly. The one that worked is 256MB and the one that did not is 4GB. I wonder if the size has anything to do with it.
Anyway, thank you for creating such a useful utility!
@Neil Aggarwal, newer (larger) USB keys usually present themselves as a hard disk, and so need to be explicitly ordered before the other harddisks in the system (my bios has a menu entry for hard disk priority). If you use an older (smaller) key then they’ll trigger the USB-FDD USB-ZIP etc. modes of the BIOS and hence will be booted first (depending on your configured device type boot order of course).
I just booted this with a 2GB key. Thanks!