Blogging is light because I'm building a computer out of spare parts for my niece, who's starting USC in the fall. I had a motherboard that I thought was recent enough to not cause problems (a Diamond Multimedia Micronics C200, vintage 1998, an ATX form factor, with a 350 MHz AMD K6-2), but the BIOS couldn't recognize hard drives larger than thirty-two gig.

("Why would anyone ever need more than 640K of RAM?" --Bill Gates, c. 1981)

So I had to flash the BIOS with a more recent version. Problem is, in order to do that, the instructions are to boot with a DOS floppy. I'm no longer running any Windows versions older than W2K, and W2K will not create an old-style DOS bootable floppy--the old "/s" parameter is no longer recognized when floppies are formatted.

I looked around for some old DOS boot disks, but they seemed to be too old to read. So now I know that most of these floppies I've been hanging on to for years to preserve the data have really only been preserving dust.

What to do?

I dug out an old Toshiba laptop (state of the art and a couple thousand bucks new, about eight years ago). I can't even put Linux on it--it's got barely enough RAM (4 meg), but the hard drive is "only" 200 meg (which was a pretty decent sized drive in a laptop in the early nineties). But it does boot into DOS, and even Windows 3.1.

I plugged in the power supply (the battery had given up the ghost years ago), and fired it up. It booted, though it didn't seem to recognize the trackball. I managed to navigate to a DOS window with the keyboard from Win 3.1. I formatted a system disk, and voila, took it over to the machine under construction and flashed the BIOS.

It now sees the forty-gig drive, and I'm in business. Now I'm just trying to decide whether to install Gatesware, or do a free RH 7.3 installation. I'm tempted to do the latter, to see how well it installs out of the box for a workstation, and how friendly it will be to a freshman college student.

So, off again...

I understand completely, that's why I keep a DOS 6.22 partition on my primary system. Currently, I have Redhat 7.3 and Win NT 4.6 on it as well.

It seems sometines that the only thing that will do the job is DOS.

Amen to that. I keep a fresh set of DOS 6.2 disks on the shelf, in case I ever have to start from scratch on any of these Wintel boxes.

I have an old 486 laptop that is currently running DOS 6.22 and Windows for WOrkgroups 3.11. When I got it someone had squeezed Windows 95 on it; I hunted around and finally found someone who had a copy of DOS they could give to me. So I reformatted it. It's all I need to do writing stuff, and you never know when you'll need to go back to basics. ;)

All you need is http://bootdisk.com. Your one stop freebie site for those DOS bootdisks that you need once in a while. Use the DrDos 7.X bootdisk to make a bios flash disk-and yes the executable to make the bootdisk works under W2K.

I should have figured there was a site like that. I should have googled for it.

Typo: Gates said 640 K.
And he doesn't want you installing extras of his
wares on your niece's machine. Freedos might work
for the flashing.

I didn't say anything about "extras." I thought I made it clear that I was comparing gatesware to freeware.

Actually, the "quotation" is bogus; it's mostly used by communicants of the First Church of Gates-is-Satan to "prove" how short-sighted Gates was.

A much better question for the time frame would have been "Why would anyone need a computer?" Too bad Gates didn't ask Steve Jobs or Gary Kildall that question.

Actually, updating the BIOS from DOS has long been a thing of the past. "Long" in industry time, that is. Performing BIOS updates from Windows has been offered on motherboards I've used since 1999. One manufacturer who does a very good job with their support is MSI. They provide a service much like Windows Update that takes all the searching and guessing out of finding updated BIOS and drivers for their products.

I'm looking forward to their upcoming Nvidia nForce2 based board. And they say they're well under way with their first chipset for the upcoing AMD 64-bit Hammer/Opteron series, which could make for an awesome yet low cost workstation.

"A much better question for the time frame would have been "Why would anyone need a computer?" Too bad Gates didn't ask Steve Jobs or Gary Kildall that question."

What is that supposed to mean? The quote is attributable to Ken Olsen of DEC fame but why would Gates be compelled to ask it of Jobs or especially Kildall? Looking back on the history of the micro industry I'm hard put to find a juncture when Gates didn't think everybody would have a computer, even several. By the late 80's this was a major point of contention in Microsoft's relationship with IBM, which was more interesting in extending their big iron market rather than appreciating that Apple was making truly 'personal computers' while failing to truly market them 'for the rest of us.'

I disagree that Apple was making "truly 'personal computers'"; they were (and are) making computers for the carriage trade.

As for the attribution, I will bet you that 9 out of 10 geeks mistakenly attribute it to Gates (10 out of 10 if they think Gates is the Antichrist).

It's nice that you can update BIOS from Windows, but this wasn't a Windows machine. It wasn't an anything machine. It was a motherboard with a bare hard drive. And the latest version of Windows that I have (W2K) requires four floppies to boot it, and I don't know, but I assume, that it also would like to have a Windows 2000 hard drive, in some state of repair or disrepair, resident.

Jobs and the board of directors priced and marketed the Mac to the 'carriage trade' but that wasn't the objective of the actual creators of the Mac. I'm a major critic of Apple and Os zealotry in general but I give credit where it is due.

As for personal, there are few other products I can think of that have such level of attachment from it's users. The Linux contingent is loony in its own way but is much more socio-politically driven. I've liked Windows more with every generation but the same can be for the platforms I used (by choice) before Windows. If Windows went away I'd just move on without mourning.

Rand, did you try a Win2K install before updating the BIOS? NT based systems has traditionally ignored the BIOS and handled recognition of drive attributes directly. This was made necessary by NTFS supporting much larger partitions than DOS while BIOS makers only felt compelled to go by the limits of DOS.

Consequently you could often get full-drive partitions on a motherboard that wouldn't provide the same under Win9x. Knowing this now isn't much help, of course, but it may come in handy in the future, especially since it only takes about five minutes to find out if Win2K is going to do the trick or not.

For what it's worth, XP will make a dos boot floppy. However, XP doesn't seem to come with fdisk, so you'll have to figure out some other way to partition the disk, such as fdisk from a previous version of windows. (Redhat's installer has an fdisk equiv.)

That is because the boot disk is intended for a different purpose than system prepping. XP very much expects there to be a CD reader in the system (or on a network volume connected via netboot) that gets the XP installer going. Once you have that you can do all the partitioning needed, provided you're making a pure FAT32 and/or NTFS system. For something more complex there are tons of good utilities from companies like PowerQuest and VCOM. They aren't free like the Linux stuff they're usually much friendlier and more helpful for the less technically proficient.

I didn't try the W2K install, because I wasn't planning to put W2K on it. I've decided to go with RH 7.3 for now.