[Discuss] bundling FreeDOS

[tmetro+blu at gmail.com (Tom Metro)]

I was updating the BIOS on a 2007-era motherboard yesterday. The BIOS it
came with was advanced enough to have a built-in flashing utility, yet
it was designed to *only* load BIOS files from floppy disks. Rather odd,
as even in 2007, floppies were already considered obsolete, and
accordingly the system in question was built without a floppy drive.

Plan B was to use the vendor supplied flash utility that runs under DOS.
 (Of course they also provide a Windows flashing tool but I wasn't about
to install Windows (or find a live CD) just to update the BIOS.)

The vendor supplies a flasher utility, but leaves it as an exercise to
the user to find a bootable DOS disk to run it from.

I ran into this same problem a while back when updating the firmware on
some Samsung hard drives.

What I don't get is why these vendors don't supply their tools
incorporated into bootable images. FreeDOS has been available for a long
time (1.0 released in 2007[1], but usable versions date back to
1998[2]). With almost no effort, they could bundle their tools with
FreeDOS. And small, bootable versions of Linux date back even earlier.
Porting tools to run under Linux should be fairly trivial.

I guess once vendors figured out how to get tools like this to run
safely under Windows, that became the path of least resistance, and the
DOS-based tools became rarely used alternatives.

The FreeDOS Wikipedia pages does site examples of at least some vendors
using it for this purpose[3], such as Asus and Intel using it to install
firmware updates.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedos#History
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedos#Compatibility
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedos#Commercial_uses


I found a simple guide for setting up a FreeDOS bootable USB Flash drive:
http://www.chavers.us/robs-place-mainmenu-42/17-ubuntu-notes/46-easiest-way-to-create-a-usb-dos-boot-disk-using-linux

After going through the usual partitioning steps, it recommends using
unetbootin to automate installing the OS to the Flash drive. I don't
think I had ran across unetbootin before. Available as a package in the
Ubuntu repositories, it provides automation to download various Linux,
BSD, and DOS distributions and install them to a drive, without booting
and running the distribution's installer. Neat. (I wonder how well they
keep it updated? Can you install the latest Ubuntu to a Flash drive with
it? I've sometimes booted live CDs inside Virtual Box to facilitate
installing OSs to flash drives, but that can be a pain to set up the raw
disk pass-through. unetbootin is potentially much simpler, if it works
well.)

Seemed to work fine for FreeDOS. When the drive boots up, you're at a
boot loader menu, with only one option. Once selected, it boots FreeDOS,
and then FreeDOS presents it's own menu. After exiting to the command
prompt, initially I was a bit surprised to find I was in a 1.44 MB
capacity "A" drive, but then realized they were just using an emulated
floppy to boot, and switching to the "C" drive showed the expected
files. (If you mount the Flash drive on a Linux or Windows system,
you'll only see the files on the "C" drive.)

(The good news is that updating the BIOS from an ancient 2007 version to
a slightly less ancient 2008 version fixed a problem where the BIOS was
telling GRUB2 incorrect addresses ranges for the system memory,
resulting in GRUB2 halting with the error, "free magic is broken at
0xffffffff." Also, with the old BIOS the system failed MemTest86+ if two
 modules were installed, but not if only one was installed. After the
update, it passed tests with 2 modules installed. So clearly that
version had bugs in the way it set up the memory controller.

Also funny that the BIOS, released just a year after the original,
included a revised built-in updating tool that will load BIOS files from
any recognized drive, not just floppies. So the vendor woke up to the
realization that floppies were obsolete.)

 -Tom

-- 
Tom Metro
Venture Logic, Newton, MA, USA
"Enterprise solutions through open source."
Professional Profile: http://tmetro.venturelogic.com/