Hacking the BIOS to get my floppy back?

[Doug White]

On Tue, 3 Feb 2004, Matt Dawson wrote:

> 	Any pointers would be welcome. I have a box running 5.2.1RC in the
> workshop which has the old AMI ACPI and floppy problem. If I boot with
> ACPI disabled I get floppy drive. If I boot with ACPI enabled I get no
> floppy and the usual fdc0: command failed at out byte 1 of 3 message in
> dmesg.

First, it'd help to know what motherboard & BIOS version you're using, and
if you're on the latest revision.

> My question is this: How does one go about hacking the ACPI in the BIOS?

Yes; use acpidump to extract the DSDT, hack, recompile with iasl (in ports
as acpica-tools or something like that), then use the dsdt_* loader.conf
options to load it. The actual options are on the acpi(4) man page, under
the section "OVERRIDING YOUR BIOS BYTECODE".

And actually, since Linux uses the same code drop, they may have the same
problems, and fixes, that FreeBSD needs, particularly if they are patches
to the DSDT.

Check the archives for links on DSDT hacking.

-- 
Doug White                    |  FreeBSD: The Power to Serve
dwhite at gumbysoft.com          |  www.FreeBSD.org