[Voyage-linux] Installing freedos - updating ALIX BIOS

[bob]

Aloha Edwin,

I recently had a go around with this, ended using the contributed 
freedos3.zip.  Extracted the image, then dd to flash.

I couldn't get a bootable dos cf any other way.

Good luck.
bob

Edwin Whitelaw wrote:
> Mike,
> 
> Could you elaborate a bit on how you got freedos and the ALIX bios 
> update to work?
> 
> I've got an old 64M CF and a bunch of newer 256 and up.  Trying to use 
> the 64M.
> In Linux, fdisk /dev/sdm and created a Linux (ext2) partition made bootable
> 
> The dd looks like it completes without error with:
> 
> d2300:/u1/nrvu-shared/ALIX# dd if=freedos_alixupdate_0.99.img of=/dev/sdm
> 16065+0 records in
> 16065+0 records out
> 8225280 bytes (8.2 MB) copied, 16.4155 seconds, 501 kB/s
> 
> After the dd, fdisk shows:
> 
> Disk /dev/sdm: 64 MB, 64094720 bytes
> 243 heads, 49 sectors/track, 10 cylinders
> Units = cylinders of 11907 * 512 = 6096384 bytes
> 
>   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
> /dev/sdm1   *           1           3       15648+   6  FAT16
> Partition 1 has different physical/logical beginnings (non-Linux?):
>     phys=(0, 1, 1) logical=(0, 1, 15)
> Partition 1 has different physical/logical endings:
>     phys=(1, 242, 49) logical=(2, 153, 49)
> 
> 
> mount /dev/sdm1 /mnt/cf
> 
> and mount | grep sdm shows
> 
> /dev/sdm1 on /mnt/cf type vfat (rw)
> 
> However, trying to boot yields:
> 
> PC Engines ALIX.3 v0.98
> 640 KB Base Memory
> 261120 KB Extended Memory
> 
> 01F0 Master 848A SanDisk SDCFB-64
> Phys C/H/S 978/4/32 Log C/H/S 978/4/32
> .Error!.
> 
> Can you see where I've erred?  Obviously being able to update the BIOS 
> is a necessary thing so I would appreciate anyone's suggestion on where 
> I've gone wrong with this approach or perhaps a better way to do it 
> altogether.  When I last update BIOS on the WRAPs I used XMODEM over 
> serial connection to write the BIOS.  Is that still possible?
> 
> TIA,
> 
> Edwin
>> K, so here we go.
>> I have an Alix3c2 also experienced the lockup problem.
>> What i did was i put freedos3 from the pcengines site on my CF after 
>> formatting
>> it to ext2 then dd'ing the image file to the disk. Additionally had to 
>> browse
>> the directories (i like dolphin) and include the alix2.bin file!!! -- 
>> can be
>> obtained from the .99 bios .zip
>> after running the flashupdate i was able to boot voyage flawlessly.
>> now, on to adding the rite packages ;)
>>
>> Please addmyself to the list as well.
>>
>>
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>>   
>