Flashing BIOS in Compaq Presario 5410
OS: none
System: AMD-K6, 400M processor; 320M RAM
The problem was with installation of 80G HDD. There was 32G limitation for HDD size at the time the box was made (about year 2000). So I had live CDs seen HDD and installing OS on it. There was no HDD present after rebooting, BIOS just didn't see it.
I used another Puppy box to create bootable floppy disk witch could flash (upgrade) BIOS.
1 Creating boot disk
1.1 Downloaded FreeDOS boot disk floppy image
wget http://www.fdos.org/bootdisks/autogen/FDOEM.144.gz
1.2 Unpacked it
gunzip FDOEM.144.gz
1.3. Inserted floppy disk into FDD and issued command
dd if=FDOEM.144 of=/dev/fd0
2 Adding sofware
My Compaq Pressario 5410 has Gigabyte GA-5SMM motherboard. Gigabyte site gives two version of BIOS upgrate.
2.1 I downloaded motherboard_bios_ga-5smm_f5.exe. The executable ([...].exe) contained three files: autoexec.bat, flash848.exe, and 5SMM.F5.
2.2 I used Ubuntu box to extract 5SMM.F5 with unrar and copied the file to floppy created in #1
2.3 Flash-tool is a software for installing (upgrading) BIOS. I assumed Flash848.exe was a tool included in motherboard_bios_ga-5smm_f5.exe. I used Uniflash 1.40 instead (downloaded uf140.zip, unpacked it and copied UNIFLASH.EXE file to the same floppy created in #1).
3. Flashing BIOS
3.1 Installed floppy in FDD and rebooted. The box booted from floppy and ended up with line A:\>.
3.2 Typed uniflash, pressed Enter and Uniflash's menu was on a screen.
3.3 Selected second line ("Flash BIOS image INCLUDING bootblock") pressed enter.
3.4 The line "Image file name:" appeared on a bottom of the screen. Pressing Enter gave a list of all files on a floppy disk. Choose 5SMM.F5, pressed Enter and flashing started.
Finally, HDD is here, BIOS is more sophisticated, and Compaq's logo is gone.
