[PLUG] Upgrading BIOS: Dell Latitude E5410

John Jason Jordan johnxj at comcast.net
Tue Feb 7 20:08:07 UTC 2012


On Tue, 7 Feb 2012 11:22:18 -0800 (PST)
Rich Shepard <rshepard at appl-ecosys.com> dijo:

>On Tue, 7 Feb 2012, John Jason Jordan wrote:
>
>> I have such a USB stick. I was even able to find it. It is only 512
>> MB, because I made it a long time ago when that was the sweet spot
>> for prices of USB sticks.

>I spent time futzing with the USB drive here and will test it tomorrow or
>Thursday (depending on how much client work I get done today and how
>much of tomorrow is getting around Frontier's blocking of outgoing
>port 25 even though they're not the ISP but the copper between here
>and aracnet.
...
>Turns out that FreeDOS 1.1 lacks the bootable capabilities of 1.0. So I
>downloaded dfbasews.iso and fdboot.img. The former has not been used,
>but I used dd to copy fdboot.img on /dev/sdb1 (wasting most of the
>space, but that doesn't matter at all). For whatever reason, I as user
>could not copy the two BIOS files (*.exe) to /dev/sdb2, but root
>could. So, now I have command.com, driver/, fdconfig.sys, freedos/,
>and kernel.sys in /dev/sd1 and the BIOS images on /dev/sdb2. As soon
>as I can, I'll boot the laptop with the USB drive (I think that
>kernel.sys is what's needed, then see if it finds the .exe files to
>run.

I didn't actually test my USB stick here because I can't easily reboot
the computer at the moment. But I stuck it in a port and observed the
following files on it:

m613z15
	ABITFAE.BAT
	awdflash.exe
	M613Z_15.BIN
	M613Z_15.TXT
	RUNME.BAT
fdboot.img.old
fdodin91_2.img
ldlinux.sys
m613z15.zip
memdisk
Shortcut to CD Drive.lnk
syslinux.cfg

<+ a bunch of irrelevant coursework files>

The .old file was probably a renaming done by me, as I commonly
add .old to files when I want to get rid of it, yet save it for just in
case.

The awdflash.exe file I am sure was the file I used to flash an Award
BIOS on my old laptop, a Compaq R3200. It was at least five years ago.
But at least it tells me that FreeDOS can run an .exe file.

If I mail this to you it would arrive no later than Thursday, probably
tomorrow. Better you should have it and not need it than need it and
not have it. 



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