UNIX for Beginners Questions & Answers

I need to update a setting in the BIOS on our SCO Openserver 5.0.7 system and all I can bring up about it says I need to create a dos bootable disk of some sort. The problem is that it doesn't seem like dos is loading up fully. I created the dos bootable thumb drive on a Windows PC using Rufus and copied over the necessary files afterwards. When I boot to the thumb drive on the same PC, everything looks fine. I have a command prompt and everything. But when I try to boot to the same thumb drive on the SCO system, all I end up with is a screen that says 'Loading FreeDos _' and it just hangs there. The cursor doesn't flash (I don't think) and I cannot type anything.

Is there something silly that I'm doing wrong here? I didn't know if there would be some way to actually create the dos bootable disk on the SCO system itself. The reason for needing to update the BIOS is that we do not seem to have network connectivity. I've noticed in the boot sequence after bcme0/bcme1 a note about 'Get adapter info failed' and 'This driver does not support ASF' The broadcom documentation that I referred to echoed that, saying that ASF needs to be disabled. Thanks very much for any help!

It is unlikely that there is anything in the BIOS that will affect a change. More likely you should run netconfig and turn off automatic speed detection.
Does the current CMOS allow changing this attribute? If not, does the readme with the new bios version add that possibility?

I honestly don't see anything about automatic speed detection in netconfig. Just line speed and flow control, which are both set to Auto-Negotiate.

No idea about why I can't seem to get a DOS prompt though eh?

That's exactly what jgt means.....Auto-negotiate is auto-detection. Try setting that to a fixed speed compatible with your switch/router.

As far as the DOS prompt is concerned you'd better tell us what hardware this is......make/model/what?

Okay. I thought that might be the same thing. Thanks for the clarification and to both of you for the help. The server in question is an IBM eServer xSeries 236 machine type 8841-25U. I will try changing the settings under netconfig and see if I get any better results.

So I've noticed something on the screen when I unplug the ethernet cable from the NIC port and replug. When I unplug it says 'Link is down' and when I replug it says 'Link is up (100 Mbps, Full Duplex, Rx & Tx Flow Control On). This seems to be regardless of what the settings in netconfig are set to. I did try setting the line speed to 'Fixed Full Duplex 100' and flow control to 'RxPause/TxPause' but there doesn't seem to be any improvement in my trying to transmit an email.

I feel like I'm so close to resolving this yet so far. I'm really still concerned about the message about disabling ASF that I'm seeing in the boot sequence. Can anyone help with the whole booting to DOS matter now that I've provided more info about the system and hardware in question?

Would this be at the root of the problem?