Ultimate Boot CD

Posted: **Tue Feb 19, 2008 3:52 am**

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.

Posted: **Tue Feb 19, 2008 10:18 am**

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.

Ultimate Boot CD

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

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