Advice pleaseForum: water cooler Topic: Advice please started by: mpie Posted by mpie on Sep. 10 2004,18:26
of knoledge that is this forum........Sticky problem the hard drive in my dell play box has died, its the machine I had dsl hd installed on and used for making packages and testing stuff on my dilema is this do i spend £40 on a 4.3GB hd which is the standard in this machine or £40 on a 40GB hard drive but will then need to reflash the bios..... Has anyone here previously re flashed a bios and if so did you encounter any problems....... any comments appreciated Posted by Grim on Sep. 10 2004,18:51
Flashing the BIOS is as easy as booting from a floppy. If you can boot from a floppy, you can flash the bios. Most BIOS upgrades are floppy images you just dd to a floppy, stick it in the drive and reboot. Nothing to it.However [comma] doesn't installing Linux negate the necessity of flashing the bios as Linux doesn't necessarily care what the BIOS says about the hardware anyway. I could be wrong but I'm sure the hawks of accuracy will either villify or verify my accuracy in short order. For what it's worth, I'd go with the bigger hard drive. It's difficult to find cheap hard drives under 80Gb nowadays unless you can find an old pc at a yard sale somewhere. According to pricewatch, a 40Gb HD is around $30, whereas an 80Gb HD is $46. Twice the storage for $13 more? Is that even a choice? If your machine finally goes to the great big beowulf cluster in the sky, you already have a decent hard drive to slap in you new machine in short order. Just my two cents. |