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[bjorktorp]

I have had the same experiences as most of you:
- tried "all" methods
- tried several types of cards
- no success (hangs at loading FreeDOS)

The most interesting observation is that I found a 128MB card with the right C/H/S geometry. Not even that one worked.

Now I have surrendered and ordered a preinstalled CF.

/Roger

[Clown]

The most interesting observation is that I found a 128MB card with the right C/H/S geometry. Not even that one worked.

Now I have surrendered and ordered a preinstalled CF.

Did you use physdiskwrite as for the pfsense? In the bios settings LBA needs to be disabled so in CHS mode!
*C* CHS mode (L) LBA mode (W) HDD wait (V) HDD slave (U) UDMA enable

OK, my card was from pcengines, but without the dos...

[fridaynoon]

done (perhaps)
Worked with 3 CF (8 MB, 1 GB, 2 GB)
The procedure is (obviously) linear and clear.
What you need: The Freedos ISO, burned on a CD.
Start with the ISO, with a CF reader attached.
1 for Boot from CD, 5 for start freedos
Go to Freedos\setup\odin
fdisk. no support for FAT32 (I think it lacks a FAT32 support in my procedure, I saw something for this, but I think irrilevant). Delete the existing partition, create a new one, make it active.
Reboot, 1 for Boot from CD, 5 for start freedos
Go to Freedos\setup\odin
format c: /s

You can say, this is what it should be. That's right.

Tell me if it works for you

[DoubleK]

Cool I'll give it a try (CD is being burned right now).

However, just two minutes ago I got my ALIX 2.3 booted via PXE into FreeDOS 
Only problem: no input possible (I see the "A:" prompt, but can't input anything). BIOS update via fdauto.bat should be possible though.
I'll check this, and then post a short tutorial here. (have enough boards to be updated here)

[DoubleK]

Tell me if it works for you

Hm- at least for me it didn't.
I think it depends much of the BIOS and the Card reader. On my wife's notebook I wasn't able to access the CF drive at all (connected via USB and multi-card-reader, "USB legacy support" enabled in BIOS).
On my PC I found some BIOS page showing the detected CF drive and the option on how to access it (I chose "simulate hard disk"). fdisk and format went well, but when booting from it, I only got "FreeDOSFreeDOSFreeDOSFreeDOS..." on my ALIX serial prompt.

So - here's my tutorial for PXE booting FreeDOS and updating the Bios. 
Prerequisites:

• tftpd-hpa (Debian: apt-get install tftpd-hpa; until now I had the netkit-tftpd running, which worked NOT in this case!)
• DHCP server (ISC dhcpd)
• FreeDOS boot image (fdboot.img), get it at http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/distributions/1.0/fdboot.img
• syslinux (3.53), get it at http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/boot/syslinux/

1.) If not done yet, set up your DHCP and TFTP server.
In your DHCP config file (/etc/dhcpd.conf) add entries for TFTP booting:

Code:

subnet 192.168.0.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 {
  allow booting;
  allow bootp;
  [...]
  next-server YOUR.TFTP.IP.HERE;
  filename "pxelinux.0";
  [...]
}

I started TFTPD as a daemon (not via inetd), so /etc/defaults/tftpd-hpa looks like that:

Code:

RUN_DAEMON="yes"
OPTIONS="-l -s /var/lib/tftpboot -r blksize"

(I'm not shure, but I think the "-r blksize" was important...)

Then start your TFTP server (/etc/init.d/tftpd-hpa start)

2.) Install the PXE boot images
Unpack syslinux anywhere (eg. at /tmp) and copy the files "pxelinux.0" and "memdisk/memdisk" into your TFTP boot directory (eg. /var/lib/tftpboot).
Copy the fdboot.img file also into that directory.
Then create a subdirectory "pxelinux.cfg" (/var/lib/tftpboot/pxelinux.cfg) and create a file called "default" within that (there are much more possibilities, see SYSLINUX docs).
The file should look like this:

Code:

SERIAL 0 38400 0
timeout 50
default fdos
prompt 1
say Booting FreeDOS via PXE

label fdos
  kernel memdisk
  append initrd=fdboot.img raw

The "raw" is extreme important!! (took me many hours to figure out...)

3.) Pimp your boot image
Inject the BIOS upgrade (from the PC Engines website) into the FreeDOS image and adjust some config files:
- mount /var/lib/tftpboot/fdboot.img /mnt -o loop
- copy ALIX1.BIN, ALIX2.BIN and BS.COM to /mnt
- edit /mnt/fdconfig.sys to look like this:

Code:

; FreeDOS 1.0 Final distro  by Blair Campbell [Blairdude@gmail.com],
; last update 2005-08-02 by Blair Campbell [Blairdude@gmail.com]
; config.sys loads system drivers. Please edit to suit your needs.
;!SWITCHES=/E
SWITCHES=/N
DEVICE=a:\driver\HIMEM.EXE
SHELL=a:\COMMAND.COM c:\ /E:2048 /F /MSG /P=a:\FDAUTO.BAT
DOS=HIGH
FILES=20
BUFFERS=20
LASTDRIVE=Z

- create and edit /mnt/fdauto.bat to look like this:

Code:

@prompt $p$g
@path=a:\freedos
@REM mode COM1:38400,n,8,1
@REM ctty COM1
sb

The "mode" and "ctty" command didn't help me to get a usable serial console, so they're REM'd.
The "sb" will start the BIOS upgrade automatically after booting.
(For first tests, you can comment that out, too)

- then unmount that image (umount /mnt).

4.) Give it a try...
Start your ALIX board, set console speed to 38400 (after BIOS upgrade this will also be the default speed), enable PXE boot, reboot.
For your convenience, here's my output of the whole update process. It might help to detect any problems if it doesn't work for you.
Btw: tftpd-hpa doesn't show you if any files are requestes/transferred (as netkit-tftp would do). Personally, I used tcpdump to observe correct behaviour.

Here's the output (@mod: I hope this is ok...)

Code:

PC Engines ALIX.2 v0.98b
640 KB Base Memory
261120 KB Extended Memory

Press <Shift-Tab> key to display network boot option menu
Try network boot first , then local drives
01F0 - no drive found !

Intel UNDI, PXE-2.0 (build 082)
Copyright (C) 1997,1998,1999  Intel Corporation
VIA Rhine III Management Adapter v2.43 (2005/12/15)

CLIENT MAC ADDR: 00 0D B9 12 72 AC
CLIENT IP: 192.168.142.220  MASK: 255.255.255.0  DHCP IP: 192.168.142.10
GATEWAY IP: 192.168.142.1

PXELINUX 3.53 2007-11-17  Copyright (C) 1994-2007 H. Peter Anvin
Booting FreeDOS via PXE
boot:
Loading memdisk....
Loading fdalix.img.........................ready.
MEMDISK 3.53 2007-11-17  Copyright 2001-2007 H. Peter Anvin
e820: 0000000000000000 00000000000a0000 1
e820: 00000000000f0000 0000000000010000 2
e820: 00000000fff00000 0000000000100000 2
e820: 0000000000100000 000000000ff00000 1
Ramdisk at 0x0fe78000, length 0x00168000
command line: initrd=fdalix.img raw BOOT_IMAGE=memdisk
Disk is floppy 0, 1440 K, C/H/S = 80/2/18, EDD off
Using raw access to high memory
Total size needed = 2310 bytes, allocating 3K
Old dos memory at 0x9fc00 (map says 0xa0000), loading at 0x9f000
1588: 0xffff  15E801: 0x3c00 0x0ee7
INT 13 08: Failure, assuming this is the only drive
old: int13 = f000b396  int15 = f000ad42
new: int13 = 9f00000a  int15 = 9f00037c
Loading boot sector... booting...
FreeDOS kernel build 2036 cvs [version Aug 18 2006 compiled Aug 18 2006]
Kernel compatibility 7.10 - WATCOMC - 80386 CPU required - FAT32 support

(C) Copyright 1995-2006 Pasquale J. Villani and The FreeDOS Project.
All Rights Reserved. This is free software and comes with ABSOLUTELY NO
WARRANTY; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the
GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation;
either version 2, or (at your option) any later version.
 - InitDiskno hard disks detected
FreeDOS HIMEM64 3.26 [Aug 25 2006] (c) 1995, Till Gerken 2001-2006 tom ehlert
HIMEM - Always On A20 method used
Kernel: allocated 43 Diskbuffers = 22876 Bytes in HMA
Unable to open file 'c:'

FreeCom version 0.84-pre2 XMS_Swap [Aug 28 2006 00:29:00]
A:\>sb
ALIX flash update (C)2007 PC Engines GmbH
Flash ID = 1 FFFF GPI = FF
Flash ID = 0 9D37 GPI = 01
Reading 512KB flash image alix1.bin................
Compare Erase Program Verify - update OK.
A:\>

[luma]

Hi,

PXE booting tutorial is perfect except the default pxelinux config filename : default.cfg

I spent long hours to find out why it was not working...

Good work DoubleK, I had success to update my bios!

[DoubleK]

PXE booting tutorial is perfect except the default pxelinux config filename : default.cfg

Oh - sorry! But thanks for the bug report, I updated the tutorial.

[covex]

done (perhaps)
Worked with 3 CF (8 MB, 1 GB, 2 GB)
The procedure is (obviously) linear and clear.
What you need: The Freedos ISO, burned on a CD.
Start with the ISO, with a CF reader attached.
1 for Boot from CD, 5 for start freedos
Go to Freedos\setup\odin
fdisk. no support for FAT32 (I think it lacks a FAT32 support in my procedure, I saw something for this, but I think irrilevant). Delete the existing partition, create a new one, make it active.
Reboot, 1 for Boot from CD, 5 for start freedos
Go to Freedos\setup\odin
format c: /s

You can say, this is what it should be. That's right.

Tell me if it works for you

ok, i was able to boot from freedos cd and create bootable cf but when i put it into alix board all it comes up with is ";" ...
and mine has 0.98 not even 0.98b

[sbyoon]

It took me 2 days to find a way to update the bios of my alix w/o a 128cf :S

I followed the instruction for creating a bootable disk for syslinux (second part) on http://ben.franske.com/blogs/bensbits.php/2007/08/21/booting_dos_from_a_usb_flash_drive

after copying the bios update files to the cf - it booted fine, but asked me to enter the full path to the command-interpreter - instead of command.com i gave him sb.com. voila! flashing started and finished with an ok.

now my alix works with RC3.

I used a 46MB CF - formatted it with FAT instead of FAT32

Thank you so much, Felixh!!

I succeeded in freedos booting and bios update with the first instruction, "Instructions for the FreeDOS direct boot method". I made a 16MB cf image to share it with everyone who has alix bios update problem.

http://210.109.84.3/download/freedos_alixupdate_16.img

You can download and write it to any cf card with 'physdiskwrite'. This image includs the 0.98g bios update files for Alix2. If you have Alix2, just execute 'sb.com' after freedos boot up. If you have others you can replace alix1.bin with alix0.bin or alix2.bin. You can get the bios update file from http://www.pcengines.ch/alix2.htm.

Pls note that you should chage CHS mode to LBA mode at alix bios setting if you face 'Error' message.

I tested this image with saveral cf cards. All they worked well. I think you can use any cf card that is bigger than 16MB.

[gmckinney]

I can verify Sbyoon's method for updating the ALIX bios does indeed work!

I just updated my ALIX2 board using his image on a 64-meg SanDisk CF card without any issues.  I performed the second upgrade on a second board using a 128-meg SanDisk CF card.

The only thing, as is noted in sbyoon's post, is to make sure the bios setting for the cf card is set to LBA mode otherwise you will get an error.

While setting up the ALIX for PXE booting over the net is not too difficult (have done it too) I find having a CF card with the bios upgrades to be a much quicker way to upgrade the bios with a lot less hardware involved 

Great work all!!

gm...

[razor2000]

i second Sbyoon's recommended instructions.  I just downloaded the file he put up online and it ran like a charm!

Remember to change your BIOS settings to LBA to be sure the freedos Bios update works.  Afterwards, your serial port settings will go back to the 38400 speeds.   At that point, go into the Bios and change it to 9600 and pop your CF card with pfsense on it and away you go.

[covex]

confirmed, it works! 

thanks and respect to sbyoon for make this image public!!!!

[thx2000]

Great work DoubleK!!

Was at this for *HOURS*.  I think I may have gotten a DOS prompt once or twice but in my exhaustion and frustration, never thought to automate the bios update through a startup script.  Regardless, thanks for bringing it all together!

[bjorktorp]

sbyoon: You're a true hero!

Thanks to you I have managed to upgrade bios. But I'm sorry to say that upgrading didn't cure the core problem. pfSense still won't boot. But now the bootproblem is different though. ;-)

I have used RC3 and the latest snapshot, both with the same result: page fault at kernel level and panic.

I guess I should have grabed the 0.92 version while it was still available at pcengines.ch and downgraded...

/Roger

[razor2000]

sbyoon: You're a true hero!

Thanks to you I have managed to upgrade bios. But I'm sorry to say that upgrading didn't cure the core problem. pfSense still won't boot. But now the bootproblem is different though. ;-)

I have used RC3 and the latest snapshot, both with the same result: page fault at kernel level and panic.

I guess I should have grabed the 0.92 version while it was still available at pcengines.ch and downgraded...

/Roger

Hi Roger,

Weird that you're still having an issue.  In case you want the 0.92 bios, you can still downloaded it.  It is located here:

http://www.pcengines.ch/file/alixb092.zip

Enjoy