Simple problem, Complex answer? (Need write access, floppy?)

[tychver]

I wish to dump my video card's BIOS with nvFlash.


Putting nvFlash.exe in dosapps was easy. I then realized that I needed some place to put the resulting file.

I can see two possible solutions:

1. I run UBCD, boot into freeDOS and run nvflash from a floppy and dump the bios file onto said floppy.

2. Writing to a drive that's part of the UBCD emulation (is that even possible? CDRW?)

Been on a wild goose chase with running UBCD off a USB drive (and trying DOS on USB drive using a HP formatting tool). Gigabyte motherboards really hate booting from USB. These two are about 4 years old, not exactly ancient but old enough to cause problems.

Searched to forums for information on using floppy drives. Realise that UBCD uses A: as the emulation disk for free dos. One post suggested that the physical drive was moved to B. However when I attempted typing B: at the command prompt in freeDOS, it seemed to move the freeDOS image to B, even after I had supposedly disabled the floppy emulation.

viewtopic.php?t=161&highlight=floppy

Does typing B: hitting return change the current working directory to B: or move the OS to B:?

Sorry but I have little exerience with DOS cmd, plenty with unix (bash) though.

[Icecube]

If you are planning to save the file (I suppose that is will contain the old bios for your videocard) to a floppy disk, it is probably easier to make a bootable floppy by yourself.
Quote from http://www.softpedia.com/get/Tweak/Vide ... lash.shtml (nVFlash v5.50).

nVFlash - NVIDIA Firmware Update Utility
Utility video updates from NVIDIA. Works only from the clean DOS, in the absence of memory managers expanded memory, such as sudo HIMEM/EMM386/QEMM.

I am not sure if the freedos image in ubcd contains one of those memory managers, but probably it will. And probably you don't have floppies of 2.8MB.

Download fdboot.img from ftp://ftp.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuf ... tions/1.0/

cd to the directory where you have saved the file and make a directory

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mkdir fdboot

Do the following as root or with sudo to mount the file to the directory 'fdboot'.

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sudo mount -t msdos -o loop fdboot.img fdboot
cd fdboot
sudo mkdir nvflash
sudo cp '~/Desktop/nvflash.exe'  ./
sudo cp '~/Desktop/cwsdpmi.exe'  ./
sync
sudo umount fdboot
cd ../..
sudo umount fdboot

Use sync to flush file system buffers to be sure that everything is written to fdboot.img

Insert a real floppy in your PC and write fdboot.img to the floppy.

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dd if=fdboot.img of=/dev/fd0

Restart your PC and boot from the floppy. Select the second choise: FREEDOS Save Mode (don't load any drivers).

In DOS dir does the same as ls in linux. Then go to the nvflash.exe.

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cd nvflash
nvflash.exe

The other exe doesn't output anything in my virtual machine but it is probably needed for nvflash.exe to work correctly.