[CentOS] OT: BIOS upgrades and booting without a floppy drive

[Maciej Żenczykowski]

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?
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