Fix Award BIOS with broken CD booting

[Agent24]

I have a thin client\terminal PC (ADi WT-500) which normally boots from a "Disk-On-Chip" EEPROM and runs Windows CE
However, it also has an IDE port and I want to connect an IDE to CF adaptor and run Linux from a CF Card instead

It seems the IDE only works when the D.O.C. chip is removed, though.

I have connected a 210MB hard drive and successfully booted DOS and run Uniflash and saved a BIOS image.

However when I connect a CD drive instead, I get errors when trying to boot anything.

With Linux I got an "ISOLINUX: Image Checksum Error, Sorry Boot Failed" error message.
With XP CD I got an "CDBOOT: Couldn't Find NTLDR" error message.

I suspect that the BIOS is the cause of the problem here. Is there a known problem with AwardBIOS which causes this error? Is it fixable? is there a workaround I could use?


I have tried looking for a BIOS update at ADi's website. They seem to be non-existant now but http://web.archive.org/web/200801021719 ... di.com.tw/ brings up a little information. There are some firmware updates but they all are ~7MB and seem to be for the embedded Windows CE and not the BIOS itself

The motherboard has TK3000B on it, which seems to be made by TermTek however they do not supply BIOS updates it would seem.

[cp]

Disable UDMA support for the cdrom in the bios. Some CD-/DVD-ROMs are blacklisted in the kernel because of their unstable UDMA operation.
You can always use syslinux (even under windows) and some generic boot image to run some tests (or even run the installation that way. no need for a cdrom).

check : https://help.ubuntu.com/9.04/installati ... files.html