I’ve been running Gentoo Linux on a Hush Silent PC for about a year now, very happily. It’s stable but complex to administer unless I work with it continuously — which I don’t. So I gave into the temptation to convert that box to Windows XP and in the process updated the BIOS to get support for a number of things…that was several days and a lot of CD-Rs ago.
The Hush PC is a beautiful metal case with a VIA mini-ITX motherboard, totally fanless and very very quiet. The VIA chipset is low-power, low-heat, despite running a 1 GHz CPU. The catch is that VIA doesn’t offer much direct support. When I flashed the BIOS (which required burning a CD to boot DOS in order to run the Award BIOS flash utility) it turned out there were a bunch of problems with the latest BIOS update from VIA (1.16) and I no longer had any display at all.
Fortunately (or not), I’m not the only one who experienced this and after plowing through a lot of unhappy comments I figured out that I had to burn a new Boot CD (there’s no floppy drive) and include the older BIOS (1.13) on it, along with the flash utility and put the call to that in the autoexec.bat file so that the system would boot from CD, run the flash update and restart itself despite my not seeing any of it.
Turns out you can still create a bootable DOS diskette in XP; it’s an option on the Format… dialog. Then I turned to Nero for burning all those bootable CDs, using the image from the floppy I’d created. I was very surprised when it all worked and the PC came up after the reboot (I had set parameters to clear all the BIOS settings back to defaults) and I am now back on track.
What a drag to go through just to update the system.
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