At 09:29 AM 2/9/99 -0500, you wrote:
Is the intention to have much of the BIOS code on the hard drive with only the minimal amount of code on the EEPROM?
That is what I was thinking. I think this approach makes it much easier to modify, update and experiment with the BIOS.
We could design the boot prom to try to boot from a primary bios image file. If the boot was unsuccessful, the next boot would occur from the backup binary image file. Thus you would be free to experiment with modifying the primary binary image and always know that you can still recover on the next boot if your experiment was less than successful.
There are a number of problems with this design, the biggest being that the user can accidentally delete the BIOS portion on his/her hard drive and completly trash the system.
But how is this different than the user deleting any needed file from their system. In either case they will have to boot from a recovery disk (or other backup media) and restore a missing file. The BIOS image is just another file that would have to be restored if it was deleted.
Dave