René Rebe

So I had to test some tiny detail of Intel VT-d variation and needed a normal PC. The only non-Apple hardware to spare in the office was some aging Sony Vaio VGN-SZ laptop which unfortunately comes with VT disabled in the BIOS. In the attempt to re-enable the VT support by some NVRAM poking I had the need to have some form of DOS for the BIOS utility and obviously I had none at hand.

So I grabbed the 1.0 release of FreeDOS and just used Qemu to install it onto a USB stick passed to the VM as hard disk:

qemu-system-x86_64 -hda /dev/sdb -cdrom fdbasecd.iso -boot d

After some minutes and a couple of Enters I had a bootable USB stick with FreeDOS for this arcane flashbacks of dancing with the high techology that is the PC BIOS.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 19th, 2009 at 15:23 and is filed under Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.