Theoretical Question

[saturndude]

Hi all,

Recently I rehabbed an 800 MHz Gateway Pent-3 for a friend. Intel made the motherboard, but Gateway may have specified certain changes from the Intel board (no onboard lan chip, more usb ports, whatever). In any event, there was a custom Gateway BIOS.

It seemed to me this board had no problem recognizing the ElTorito boot instructions on a Windows 98 First Ed. CD that I put in, as a test (98 Second Ed. CDs had no ElTorito, IIRC). But the machine did not recognize a Mandrake boot CD that I put in. I believe the machine also did not boot when I put a 98 First Ed. CD into a SCSI CD-RW (I hung it off a PCI Adaptec 2940UW, which DOES HAVE a booting BIOS, so it should have worked).

Even when the ATAPI CD-ROM was set as the first boot device, and the hard disk was not selected as a boot device at all, there are times when it would not work.

The machine originally came with ME (no SCSI support whatsoever). Is it possible to write a motherboard BIOS that doesn't allow SCSI bios to boot the machine? Can a mobo BIOS tell whether the ElTorito is on a Windows CD or Linux CD? Maybe the Linux install kernel went over 640K, and the machine couldn't flip between real mode and protected mode correctly?

I don't think my linux install CD was scratched, but it could have been.

How much control can BIOS writers exert here? Any ideas?

All knowledge, wild theories, speculation, etc. is welcome. Thanks in advance.

[bonestonne]

hm, you know, i've had that problem too. if the CD isn't bootable, in some cases, it doesn't work at all. i have a Darwin CD from a while ago, Darwin is a version of Mac that was recoded to work on anything, although the program was shut down because they didn't reach their goals in 6 months...

basically, if theres no boot sector for the CD, it may not boot for anything. try maybe removing the HDD from the boot device list if possible, i have an Amibios, and it allows me to do that, so that would force the computer to boot like that, although i'm not sure how well it would work, i've never do it. that should be bootable, as a lot of linux kernals are used to fix computers...do you have an IDE drive you can use? SCSI isn't the best mix for some things..i had a lot of trouble getting SCSI to work with this computer, i ended up giving up the battle, but i recently found the drivers, so i may try again.

[ShadeTreeLee]

I have a Boot Up System Speed selection in my BIOS which makes all the difference in the world when booting CDs. Set to High, sometimes it don't work and if Low then it almost always attempts to boot bootable CDs. According to the BIOS manual, this setting slows the CPU while in non-protected DOS mode for better compatiblity with DOS games.

OEM 98 CDs were bootable, retail never were. It is not Gold VS. SE that marks a 98CD as bootable, it's OEM VS. Retail. Upgrade or full version didn't matter either, just OEM VS. Retail. My full Retail 98SE is not bootable nor does it have the Powertoys folder.