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YES you can boot MS-DOS on MacPro (dvd fw flashing...)

A

alien2108

macrumors member
Original poster
Apr 20, 2005
45
2
Maribor, Slovenia
Hey all!

Since this can be usefull for someone here it is :) I can confirm I sucessfully booted DOS from CD on MacPro. I was playing along with GPU firmware and I needed DOS. So after using spare PC's for the job I thought hey if XP installer works, why shouldn't plane old DOS. Well and it did :)

So if you need DOS for DVD drive firmware flashing, GPU bios flash experiments (like dumping original MacPro X1900XT flash etc. ;) you can do it!

HOWTO for DOS boot CD:
- Make a DOS bootable floppy or usb stick (if you need more stuff use USB, I did) (www.bootdisk.com, I used XP Startup disk floppy image)
- Put on it everything you need (atiflash, bios image...)
- Burn bootable CD with Nero (select floppy/usb as source for boot sector)

HOW to make bootable USB (since MacPro has no floppy):
- Get a bootdisk image (www.bootdisk.com) and extract it to folder
- Download HP Drive Key USB Boot Utility http://h18000.www1.hp.com/support/files/serveroptions/us/locate/69_6073.html
- Use it and point it to your USB key and extracted boot disk image

When CD is made it will look empty! Don't worry that's normal since bootsector stuff is not visible in explorer/finder...
 
Good to know!

However I think I will just pop the video card into my PC if I really need to do any fw work... ;)
 
pastrychef said:
Yep. That's what I did... Burned a bootable DOS CD with nvflash and a few different firmwares on it for easy flashing.
Click to expand...
that sounds excellent!
how did you retrieve your orig.bin? it doesnt back up to cd does it?
 
noobey said:
that sounds excellent!
how did you retrieve your orig.bin? it doesnt back up to cd does it?
Click to expand...

The first time I did the flashing, I did it with a hard drive being accessible. But I ended up accidentally deleting the original ROM file by accident anyway (I'm an idiot). I got it back from another one of the members here...
 
You should also take a look at The Ultimate Boot Disc.

It includes a lot of useful utilities and tools.

http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/customize.html

You can customize it with disk images for flashing by following the instructions there. This can be done on a Mac or PC without issue. Just open up the ISO and edit it. If necessary use disc utility to convert it into an editable ISO or DMG (though ISO would be preferable for convenience sake).
 
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