[geeks] Dell T105 Server, CPU and RAM upgrade

[Michael-John Turner]

On Thu, Mar 19, 2009 at 04:48:08PM -0400, nate at portents.com wrote:
> Get your hands on the HP USB formatting utility that turns just about any
> USB flash memory device into a bootable flash device (I've currently
> tested it on a wide range of PCs with a wide range of BIOSes and it
> actually shows up as a "hard drive" device, which means it's even worked
> great on systems that don't have explicit USB device booting).  It's a
> Windows program.

I've had good luck with Unetbootin[1], which does something quite similar.
It's available for both Windows and Linux and has predefined options for
most popular OSes.

> Now I carry around a minimal DOS installation on a USB flash drive and
> just load up whatever BIOS/firmware flashing utilities I need, and when I
> boot up a system I go into the BIOS, go to the hard drive order, move the
> USB flash drive up to the top, and have the system boot off that and I'm
> good.

It's becoming more and more difficult to boot DOS on newer systems these
days. I recently had to upgrade the firmware on the Seagate drives in my
T105 but it won't boot FreeDOS - FreeDOS panics when booted on a system
with a native-only SATA controller. I eventually had to put the disks in
another system to update them - a real PITA.

[1] http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/

-mj
-- 
Michael-John Turner 
mj at mjturner.net      <>  http://mjturner.net/