VIA KT133 data corruption update

["Bryan O'Sullivan" <bos@serpentine.com>]

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After several months of begrudgingly putting up with my ASUS A7V
motherboard corrupting roughly 1 byte per 100 million read during
moderate to heavy PCI bus activity, I flashed VIA's 1009 BIOS this
evening.

I have not been able to reproduce any corruption since then (it was
ridiculously easy before the new BIOS), and my machine seems otherwise
as stable as I would hope.  This marks the first time since 2.4.6 that
I've been able to run a Linus kernel without cowering.

I also discovered, of necessity, a halfway manageable process for
creating a DOS boot floppy using Windows ME, which Microsoft would
apparently prefer was not possible.  I'll reproduce the steps here,
since otherwise flashing a new BIOS is likely to be nightmarish for
people stuck dual booting into WinME.

Most of these steps occur under Linux, and I'll assume that your Windows
Me "C:" drive is mounted as /dos/c.

- Format a floppy:
  fdformat /dev/fd0H1440

- Create a FAT filesystem:
  mkdosfs /dev/fd0

- Mount the floppy:
  mount /dev/fd0 /mnt

- Copy across a few files:
  cp /dos/c/command.com /mnt
  cp /dos/c/io.sys /mnt
  cp /dos/c/msdos.sys /mnt

- Edit /mnt/msdos.sys, and change values as follows:
  [Paths]
  WinDir=a:\
  WinBootDir=a:\
  HostWinBootDrv=a

  [Options]
  BootMulti=0
  BootGUI=0
  AutoScan=0

- Copy across your BIOS flash utility (probably aflash.exe) and BIOS
  image.  Unmount the floppy (important; don't just reboot):
  umount /mnt/floppy

- When you reboot to the floppy, it will desperately try to boot into
  Windows.  When it prompts you for the path to some Windows VXD, just
  type "a:\command.com", and lo, you've got a DOS prompt.

Cheers,

	<b

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