Hi Teddy, > We are customers about to make a trial against Asus on french court > for a hidden problem in the bios of their "Asus ROG G741JM" notebook > preventing it from switching between several boot options (ie. when > ODD is set as boot option #1 and there's no bootable disk inside the > PC shows an error message instead of booting on boot option #2, the > HDD).
I personally would recommend to not select drives with changeable media (floppy, CD, DVD, BD, USB storage) as the first choice for booting: If you forget a disk in such a drive and reboot, your computer will try to boot from it and you might get a virus from that if the disk is not one of the boot CD / ... that you wanted to use but some arbitrary other one with possibly tainted data. But I understand your problem: You want that the BIOS does a fall-through, trying the next disk instead when it detects that the first choice is not bootable... > Asus R&D and technical support are putting the blame on FreeDOS for > this bug saying "We regret to inform you that the boot limitation on > the optical drive is due to the compatibility of this BIOS wirh > FreeDOS" (see below e-mail, in french). [omitting that: it looks as if you summarize them well] Unfortunately you have not shown us your question to ASUS, only their answer: I can imagine that if you put a FreeDOS boot CD or DVD in the optical drive, it will load a boot menu from that CD and that boot menu might then have some menu item "skip CD, continue by trying to boot next drive" and THAT indeed may have limited support for certain BIOS and boot menu combinations. But that could also happen for Linux or Windows boot CD left in the drive, depending on how they implement the "try next disk on boot drive list" menu option... If your problem, however, happens when you do NOT have ANY disk in the CD drive, then it probably means that somehow ASUS has a feature in their BIOS which SIMULATES a FreeDOS CD in the drive whenever the drive in fact is empty. I have seen similar problems with LG CD/DVD drives which (inside the BIOS of the CD/DVD drive) had a simulation of a CD: It was there to "give" the user some additional software from LG without having to ship a physical CD with the drive. As many users got annoyed about that, LG provided a firmware update for the CD/DVD drive which removes the "feature" :-) So maybe ASUS is trying to give you a feature by having a simulation of a FreeDOS CD in your optical drive exactly if it finds no physical CD in the drive? And maybe it uses a version of a FreeDOS CD where the boot menu "try the next drive on the boot priority list" selection is incompatible with the boot capabilities of the ASUS BIOS? In that case, they could probably update either the BIOS or the version of the boot menu used on the (probably outdated copy of a) FreeDOS "CD", but you will have to give more details here. Note that we use common third party boot menu software for our bootable CD, so both updating the CD and updating the BIOS should be possible without modifications from FreeDOS but of course some FreeDOS experts could advise ASUS about the possibilities here. As you notice, my advice is mostly based on guessing what your problem is and which change you want from ASUS. Your mail and the cited mail from ASUS are not specific enough. Regards, Eric PS: The unwanted LG "CD" was called "Bluebirds" installer and as said, removal is done by either upgrading the drive firmware (basically a BIOS) or by teaching your operating system to identify the simulated CD as such and ignore it. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Dive into the World of Parallel Programming The Go Parallel Website, sponsored by Intel and developed in partnership with Slashdot Media, is your hub for all things parallel software development, from weekly thought leadership blogs to news, videos, case studies, tutorials and more. Take a look and join the conversation now. http://goparallel.sourceforge.net/ _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
