BIOS upgrading

[Mikkel L. Ellertson]

Michael Wiktowy wrote:
> On 10/27/07, Mikkel L. Ellertson <mikkel at infinity-ltd.com> wrote:
>> If you have partition 1 as your /boot partition, and you have
>> wbiosboot.img as your image file, you can have an entry like this:
>>
>> title BIOS update
>>         root (hd0,0)
>>         chainloader /wbiosboot.img
> 
> I didn't know that grub chainloader was capable of doing this. You
> mention doing this with a floppy image, is it possible to boot into
> bootable ISO images this way?
> 
> /Mike
> 
A couple of things - first of all, it looks like I made a mistake.
This does not work with a standard floppy image. I have to see if it
works if you load the entire image, instead of the boot sector. It
does work with several images I have here, but the entire executable
is loaded. I have images that do things like let you boot from a CD
on systems that do not support it, and other non-dos based images. I
do have a DOS image that works, but it does not appear to be a
standard DOS image on closer examination. A standard DOS floppy
image will try to read the real drive after boot.

I am fairly sure I have done this on another machine, but I can not
remember exactly how I did it. I will have to check when I get
access to that machine again, or I find my notes on it.

As far as using an .iso image, there are a couple of problems. The
first is that you would have to supply the offset to the boot loader
on the image. The second is that unless you load the entire image
into memory, then loader and software on the image will not be able
to access the image.  I believe you also need a driver to intercept
the calls to read the CD, and return the proper information from the
image in memory. But it would be nice to be able to do it.

Mikkel
-- 

  Do not meddle in the affairs of dragons,
for thou art crunchy and taste good with Ketchup!

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