I personally don't believe what Asus says, I don't understand how any DOS could
affect the behaviour of the BIOS.
And here the problem is not even when there's a bootable disk in the ODD but
when the ODD is empty and this Asus BIOS don't even check if there's a boot
option 2.
To me it looks like Asus just duplicated the stupid BIOS of their ODD-less
models are reused it for their laptops with ODD, so no matter how many boot
option we create, it will always just use the first one...
Date: Fri, 20 Mar 2015 03:00:39 -0700
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [Freedos-devel] FreeDOS compatibility issue according to Asus
What I am curious about is to know why an operating system would affect the
activities of BIOS.BIOS is its own separate thing.It looks for operating
systems,yes,but operating systems can not prevent BIOS from doing its usual
tasks.The operating systems aren't even loaded.That's what BIOS is for.If you
were trying to multiboot from one harddrive,that could be the problem.FreeDOS
doesn't 'like' to multiboot with other OSs.But BIOS wouldn't blank out all
bootable devices.
On Thu, Mar 19, 2015 at 7:18 PM, Eric Auer <[email protected]> wrote:
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.
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