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Path: sserve!manuel!munnari.oz.au!network.ucsd.edu!swrinde!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!moe.ksu.ksu.edu!maverick.ksu.ksu.edu!news From: brtmac@maverick.ksu.ksu.edu (Brett McCoy) Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd Subject: new boot roms Message-ID: <183c4vINNfit@maverick.ksu.ksu.edu> Date: 2 Sep 92 21:36:31 GMT Organization: Kansas State University Lines: 21 NNTP-Posting-Host: maverick.ksu.ksu.edu Okay, here's a thought. Why doesn't someone write up some new boot room code that would make a PC act a lot like a Sun when you turn it on. Get rid of all the gunky MS-DOS support. Put in a nice little monitor to examine memory and various registers and i/o ports and allow easy booting from any device and any partition on that device. This would effectively disable the machines ability to run MS-DOS, but that wouldn't be a great loss anyway. It might be possible to dump the ROM code before replacing the ROM's, and store it on the last couple, or first couple, tracks of a hard disk. Then the new boot code could, upon detecting an MS-DOS boot, load the old ROM code, twiddle a few bits and bytes and jump to the old code and let it finish loading MS-DOS and provide the BIOS support that it needs. This is far, far beyond any skills I have, but it seems like it might be worthwhile and would solve a lot of the problems and workarounds that people are having and using now. Maybe someone should get on AMI's or Phoenix's back and get them to add some support for other OS's than MS-DOS in their boot code. ++Brett;