Category Archives: #CS

Creating a bootable disk to flash BIOS

One of the issues that we had while setting up our cloud was incompatible BIOS revision on the machines we were using. They were out of date and did not allow the use of virtualization, so we had to update the BIOS a certain way with the DELL Executable that was the only way to update the BIOS was using an EXE.

 

The first step to creating the bootable disk was downloading FreeDOS so that we can boot up into FreeDOS and run the executable.

In order to do this you do: wget http://www.fdos.org/bootdisks/autogen/FDOEM.144.gz

Then, gunzip FDOEM.144.gz to unzip the file.

 

The second step is to copy the BIOS flash utility and the BIOS image that needs to be used to upgrade, and mount it to a floppy disk image. Here is what you do in order to complete this step:

modprobe vfat

modprobe loop

mkdir /tmp/floppy

mount -t vfat -o loop FDOEM.144 /tmp/floppy

After mounting the Floppy you want to copy the EXE. that you downloaded for the BIOS:

cp DELLBIOSVERSION.exe /tmp/floppy (not actual name of the bios)

then unmount the floppy: umount /tmp/floppy

 

Step 3 is to burn the bootable CD which emulates a floppy device.

mkisofs -o bootcd.iso -b FDOEM.144 FDOEM.144
cdrecord -v bootcd.iso

After you have created this bootable disk, all you have to do is boot the CD in the machine and basically type in the EXE. and it will autoflash to the new bios.

From the blog armindoa » WSU CS by mindoftw and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

All about git

Last week’s class was, for reasons that were made quite obvious, all about git. Just from the examples and small bit of experience we got with this tool in class, I can already tell that it will be extremely valuable for the remainder of the course, and my career as a computer scientist. Version control is a new topic to myself and going over the functionality of git made it fairly straight forward. It will take a little bit to get used to the commands to use git efficiently, but that goes without saying.

I actually think it would be a good idea to have CS students learn about git much earlier in their college careers and put it to practice in group coding assignments. This would provide students with a work environment for a project similar to the real world, long before they actually get there.

From the blog clacroix12 by clacroix12 and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.