[ros-kernel] WARNING! Isoboot seems to be able to damage the flash bios!!

[Eric K. <ek...@rz...>]

Hi!

This is no joke! :-(
Yesterday I tried isoboot on my 'other' machines. It seemed to work pretty
well on my noteboot so I wanted to try two other machines. After the 'Press
any key to boot from CD' message the machines seemed to be frozen and I
pressed the reset button. In both cases the bios was damaged.

The MSI (MicroStar) K7T Turbo (MS-6330 V3.0), which does NOT a have a bios
protection jumper, seems to be almost entirely dead. The other machine is an
ECS (Elitegroup) D6VAA 1.1 booted into the bios boot block and asked for a
boot disk to reflash the bios. The ECS board has a bios protection jumper,
but of course it is diabled by default. After reflashing the ECS board it
seems to be okay again.

I just ordered a 'bios saver' which will allow to switch between the
original bios and a backup bios. This way I hope to get the MSI board
working again.

At present I'm trying to find out why isoboot fails to run freeldr and why
the bios gets damaged. Please don't use isoboot until further notice! If you
ignore my advice, don't come to me crying that isoboot ate your bios.


See you,
Eric