[sf-lug] BIOS Update

[Jason Turner]

On Jul 7, 2007, at 6:15 AM, Tom Haddon wrote:

> Hi Folks,
>
> Got a request here. Is there anyone coming to the computer lab  
> tomorrow
> that has a computer running Windows with a floppy disk drive and some
> some floppy disks? I need to update the BIOS on the donated  
> servers, and
> from what I can see on the Dell site, the only option is a Windows
> executable that will create the floppies for you. Since I have neither
> floppy drives nor Windows, I'm out of luck on both...
>
> In the current BIOS version, the servers seem to only allow booting  
> from
> hard disk or floppy, which makes the installation a little more
> cumbersome - especially seeing as I have no floppy drive to write  
> disks
> to...
>
> Thanks, Tom
> -- 


Tom,

A couple questions back at you... have you tried this bit of insiders  
advice from ExpertsExchange,

"Booting from CD (from the PE2300 user's Guide):

    *  In the system setup program, the Secondary SCSI category must  
be set to On and the Boot Sequence category must be set to Diskette  
First .
     * In the SCSI Select utility, the BIOS Support For Bootable CD- 
ROM category must be set to Enabled.
"

I looked through the update notes of several BIOS updates and missed  
the explicit addition of boot menu changes.  Yes, I can just grab the  
latest and greatest.... http://tinyurl.com/29ytzf

This begs the question, are there any more "critical" firmware  
updates we should snag for these servers?

I've got access to a floppy drive on a Win2000 machine but I can't  
bring it[the machine] with me.  Hopefully the above config  
instructions work with the current BIOS.  If not, I can bring  
floppies of any suggested updates.


--
jt