CentOS - Aug 2005 - OT: BIOS upgrades and booting without a floppy drive

I've got a machine running CentOS 3.5 with an Intel D865GBF
motherboard and I've been having an occasional "event" where
disk-intensive activity (such as running "yum check-update" or
starting up OpenOffice) causes the load average to spike and X11 to
become unresponsive (as in, the pointer won't even track the mouse)
for a few seconds.  The machine always recovers and returns to normal,
but it's getting a bit annoying.

I saw one thread in which the suggested solution for a vaguely similar
problem was to switch from the SMP kernel with hyperthreading to the
UP kernel, but that hasn't made much difference.  Then I saw Dave G's
recent thread in which a more severe yum-related lockup was solved
with a BIOS upgrade.

I see there's a D865GBF BIOS upgrade on the Intel site, dating from
May.  Problem is it comes only as either a Windows installer, or a
bootable floppy -- and not only does this machine not have a floppy
drive, but the case configuration is such that the DVD-ROM drive
blocks access to the floppy connector on the motherboard, so I'm
looking at minor surgery just to stick one in temporarily.

Is there any clever way around this?  Some way to make a bootable CD
from the floppy image, for example?  Or must I grit my teeth and bring
out the screwdrivers?

On Mon, 2005-08-22 at 18:01 -0700, Bart Schaefer wrote:
> I've got a machine running CentOS 3.5 with an Intel D865GBF
> motherboard and I've been having an occasional "event" where
> disk-intensive activity (such as running "yum check-update" or
> starting up OpenOffice) causes the load average to spike and X11 to
> become unresponsive (as in, the pointer won't even track the mouse)
> for a few seconds.  The machine always recovers and returns to normal,
> but it's getting a bit annoying.
> 
> I saw one thread in which the suggested solution for a vaguely similar
> problem was to switch from the SMP kernel with hyperthreading to the
> UP kernel, but that hasn't made much difference.  Then I saw Dave
G's
> recent thread in which a more severe yum-related lockup was solved
> with a BIOS upgrade.
> 
> I see there's a D865GBF BIOS upgrade on the Intel site, dating from
> May.  Problem is it comes only as either a Windows installer, or a
> bootable floppy -- and not only does this machine not have a floppy
> drive, but the case configuration is such that the DVD-ROM drive
> blocks access to the floppy connector on the motherboard, so I'm
> looking at minor surgery just to stick one in temporarily.
> 
> Is there any clever way around this?  Some way to make a bootable CD
> from the floppy image, for example?  Or must I grit my teeth and bring
> out the screwdrivers?
http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/
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It should be possible to burn a floppy image (a pure 1.44 * 1024 * 1000 
byte image) to a bootable-cd in floppy emulation mode with proper options 
to mkisofs and cdrecord.

On Mon, 22 Aug 2005, Bart Schaefer wrote:
> I've got a machine running CentOS 3.5 with an Intel D865GBF
> motherboard and I've been having an occasional "event" where
> disk-intensive activity (such as running "yum check-update" or
> starting up OpenOffice) causes the load average to spike and X11 to
> become unresponsive (as in, the pointer won't even track the mouse)
> for a few seconds.  The machine always recovers and returns to normal,
> but it's getting a bit annoying.
>
> I saw one thread in which the suggested solution for a vaguely similar
> problem was to switch from the SMP kernel with hyperthreading to the
> UP kernel, but that hasn't made much difference.  Then I saw Dave
G's
> recent thread in which a more severe yum-related lockup was solved
> with a BIOS upgrade.
>
> I see there's a D865GBF BIOS upgrade on the Intel site, dating from
> May.  Problem is it comes only as either a Windows installer, or a
> bootable floppy -- and not only does this machine not have a floppy
> drive, but the case configuration is such that the DVD-ROM drive
> blocks access to the floppy connector on the motherboard, so I'm
> looking at minor surgery just to stick one in temporarily.
>
> Is there any clever way around this?  Some way to make a bootable CD
> from the floppy image, for example?  Or must I grit my teeth and bring
> out the screwdrivers?
> _______________________________________________
> CentOS mailing list
> CentOS at centos.org
> http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
>

Bart Schaefer wrote:
>I see there's a D865GBF BIOS upgrade on the Intel site, dating from
>May.  Problem is it comes only as either a Windows installer, or a
>bootable floppy -- and not only does this machine not have a floppy
>drive, but the case configuration is such that the DVD-ROM drive
>blocks access to the floppy connector on the motherboard, so I'm
>looking at minor surgery just to stick one in temporarily.
>
>Is there any clever way around this?  Some way to make a bootable CD
>from the floppy image, for example?  Or must I grit my teeth and bring
>out the screwdrivers?
If you're set up to do PXE, you can boot a floppy image over the network via
PXELINUX/MEMDISK and get rid of the physical media altogether.

http://syslinux.zytor.com/pxe.php

Dave Thompson
UW-Madison