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Quotes of the week (Linus special)

Posted Oct 16, 2009 22:06 UTC (Fri) by Tet (subscriber, #5433)
In reply to: Quotes of the week (Linus special) by nix
Parent article: Quotes of the week (Linus special)

I need 1) a floppy drive (on a modern server?! WTF?)

Nope. mkisofs will turn a floppy image into a bootable CD-ROM. That's how I did my last BIOS upgrade. Quite why the vendors still distribute floppy based upgrades rather than ISO9660 images is beyond me. But it's not the end of the world.

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Posted Oct 16, 2009 22:13 UTC (Fri) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]

http://www.freedos.org/freedos/files/ has the iso images (in fact you would have to hunt down the floppy image)

Quotes of the week (Linus special)

Posted Oct 16, 2009 23:08 UTC (Fri) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Aha. Thanks for this: I've never done the bootable-CD dance (I prefer PXE
booting in recovery situations).

I'll have a look at that, if I get the gumption to risk my system by doing
an upgrade at all (although bootable USB might be preferable, I dunno).

Quotes of the week (Linus special)

Posted Oct 16, 2009 23:11 UTC (Fri) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link]

An alternative is memdisk - drop it into /boot, add it as a kernel entry in grub with initrd pointing to the floppy image to want, reboot.

Dell have support for updating their BIOSes via Linux. There's an app that copies it into a pre-allocated chunk of RAM, and then on reboot the firmware performs the flash itself.