On 2007-12-07, Roy Schestowitz <newsgroups@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Bery is a Fedora derivative and your BIOS can't be overwritten. You post this
Actually, sometimes a BIOS can be overwritten. I had Windows 95 kill
two expensive motherboards that way. The spec for them said Win98 or
later, but I figured Win95 would probably work. Boy, was I wrong!
The problem is device probing. Modern peripheral buses provide a safe
way to identify what cards are present. E.g., you can find out an ID
number for a PCI card that identifies who made it and what it is. But
there was no standard way to do that for the ISA bus. So what you have
to do is probe locations that are associated with cards you have drivers
for, and see if they react in ways consistent with those cards.
This is a big hack, requiring a lot of care. Suppose, for example, the
operations you use to probe for a particular ethernet card happen to
match the operations that a particular disk controller card uses to
initiate formatting the disk? In that case, you'd better make sure that
you've checked for the disk controller first!
On this particular motherboard, some device probe during Win95
installation hit the command sequence that flashed the BIOS. I don't
know if it erased it, or reflashed it with garbage, but the result was
an unbootable motherboard.
I'm not saying this sort of thing happened in the OP's case. Just
pointing out that it *is* possible for an OS installation to wipe a
BIOS, if the motherboard designers have made an unfortunate choice of
how to do the BIOS reflashing interface.
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