Does anybody know of a program that runs in debian that can backup the BIOS configuration so one can basically yank it back to what it should be if the settings get corrupted? This is one of my biggest pet peaves since on 95% of most PC's, the setup process is inaccessible and Dells seem to be really good at self-mutations. I've got a system whose BIOS date is from around 2004. On Saturday, I plugged a second hard drive in to the same controller bus as the boot drive in order to make an image of that drive on to a file on the boot drive and all appeared to go well at the time. I didn't do anything stupid like accidentally switch the input and output file names and it all just worked. After powering off, removing the second drive and rebooting, I then discovered that there was a wait of close to a minute and then that horrible quick double-beep which says there will be no boot yet. I accidentally discovered that if I hit F1, it does boot and works fine. I got out the talking archlinux rescue disk which is one of the best rescue disks I have ever seen and ran fdisk on the boot drive. It is okay and as near as I can tell, some BIOS setting has changed so it it time to hookup the monitor and have my wife help me determine why F1 is now needed to finish booting. I also have some oder Dells that like to get themselves in to a mode where the floppy is the first boot drive and the hard disk is always next and then the CDROM is last. That's a royal pain if you want to try out a live CD and find out why it doesn't work. A yankback program would be most useful for that since whatever bug causes this mutation just randomly appears. You set the boot order and six months later, it has reverted back to useless mode. The two tools I wish I had the most for older P.C's are that yankback or forceback program for the BIOS and a floppy that had enough drivers on it to boot off of usb drives. There are reportedly some images out there that will do that. One would probably get a slow boot since many built-in usb ports run at 13 megabits but that beats no boot at all. Of course the absolute gold standard would be a way in to the setup screen. I actually have a board that I bought many years ago that can intercept the video displays on some systems and I got it to work on a few, but it doesn't work on many more. BIOS firmware is specific to certain types of boards so one would need to have a forceback program that was aimed at a specific group of BIOS programs but it could be done. Any ideas are appreciated. Martin _______________________________________________ Blinux-list mailing list Blinux-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/blinux-list