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Hard drive fails to boot, no light, no floppy drive, no problem! The immortal system keeps your computer maintenance on track!

Some time ago, I saw a post "Clean BIOS Junk, Improve System Boot Speed" in the system maintenance area. I was very interested and went back to test it in my spare time. Actually, I felt that the improvement in boot speed was not obvious. In disappointment, I saw大侠 fujianabc's reply in this post, saying that adding a freedos in the BIOS. Don't be laughed at by all the great experts, I really heard for the first time that freedos can be put into the BIOS. So I started to be a little scared and wanted to do it myself. I indirectly found the download address of the rom version of freedos from the link provided by fujianabc http://rayer.ic.cz/romos/romose.htm. Fortunately, I can generally understand this English website. So I went ahead and did it.

First, I downloaded this romos.bin (the 64kb one), and then prepared other tools, such as CBROM (Lao Maotao used CBROM version 2.19), WinFlash (a tool for flashing/backing up BIOS under Windows). The specific operation steps are as follows:

1. Backup BIOS, just in case
First, run WinFlash to divide the current motherboard BIOS into a file, such as I815_BAK.BIN. Then, we need to make a BIOS emergency recovery disk, that is, add the automatic recovery function of BIOS to a Win98 boot floppy disk. The specific method:
(1) Make a clean Win98 boot floppy disk, which only retains the most basic files such as IO.SYS, MSDOS.SYS, COMMAND.COM, etc. Then put this I815_BAK.BIn in the root directory of the floppy disk, and also put AWDFLASH.EXE (DOS-based AWARD BIOS flashing tool) in the root directory of the floppy disk. Then create an AUTOEXEC.BAT file in the root directory of the floppy disk with the following content:

AWDFLASH I815_BAK.BIN /PY /SN /SB /R

In this way, if there is a problem with the modified BIOS and it cannot boot after flashing, you can find a floppy drive, insert this floppy disk, and restart the machine to automatically restore the original BIOS. Be sure to use the /SB parameter, so that the BootBlock part of the BIOS will not be updated when flashing the BIOS. At least after bricking, the motherboard can still boot the floppy drive and ISA graphics card. (ISA graphics cards are hard to find, floppy drives should be easy to find)

2. Clean BIOS junk, free up 64KB space
Make a copy of I815_BAK.BIN for us to edit, for example, name it I815_DOS.BIN. First, run CBROM219.EXE I815_DOS.BIN /D. Use this to check the current BIOS space usage, and find that the remaining space is only 56.12k.

Since the I815 motherboard integrates an i752 graphics card, a VGA module will be seen, and there is also a VRS module. Removing these two modules can free up 64kb of space.
Run CBROM219.EXE I815_DOS.BIN /VGA Release and CBROM219.EXE I815_DOS.BIN /VRS in sequence to remove these two modules,

We run CBROM219.EXE I815_DOS.BIN /D again. At this time, we will find that the remaining space has increased to 85.18kb.

3. Add freedos to the BIOS file
Now that there is enough space, we can add this freedos to the BIOS.
Run CBROM219.EXE I815_DOS.BIN /ISA romos.bin,
We will see the newly added freedos module.

4. Flash the new BIOS file
Flash the new BIOS file into the current motherboard. This step can also be realized using WinFlash. Not much to say

Let's take a look at the effect after flashing. After restarting, after skipping the first screen in the POST, the prompt "Press to boot ROMOS!" will appear.

Hurry up and press the ScrollLock key on the keyboard. After listing the device list in the POST, the loading screen of freedos will appear, with a line of yellow "Welcome to ROMOS ver. 1.02 by Martin Rehak (c) 2001-2006; rayer@seznam.cz".

It starts up in a very short time.

OK, so far, the operation of adding the freedos micro operating system (is it considered an operating system? Hehe!) in the BIOS is a great success. As long as there is a FAT32 partition on your hard drive and there are some programs that can run under DOS, such as FDISK.COM, FORMAT.COM, DISKGEN.EXE, GHOST.EXE, etc., run it with confidence. You can run your GHOST to restore your system disk data like this, you can also partition, format like this, and even install the operating system. How about it, isn't it very cool? Most importantly, even if your CD-ROM drive, floppy drive are gone, and the boot information of the hard drive is lost and cannot boot, it doesn't matter. Boot to freedos, run GHOST.EXE, done!

Is it made with ROMOS?

The method has been posted.

Oh, such a good post actually got buried

A lot of people have already known it.

I really don't know about this. I don't know if the BIOS of my motherboard can be installed.

Accidentally saw it, unprecedented and unrivaled. There are only things you can't think of, nothing you can't do.

It's just ROMOS. Playing this requires being bold and careful. It's not recommended for novices to try. The owner of the post may not have even tried it. Whoever is brave enough can challenge themselves ~~~~~~~~

The floppy drive is broken. Flashing the BIOS is too risky. I'll just continue using the CD drive...

I have failed in flashing the BIOS by myself, and I get nervous when seeing articles with the words "flash BIOS".

As long as it's not CMOS, it's not immortal (I mean as long as something can be flashed, it's not immortal, it's funny to brick it). It's better to create 2 primary partitions with one system hidden. Unfortunately, DOS can only be booted with GNU GRUB.

Last edited by shanliang8008 on 2007-10-30 at 03:49 PM ]