Boot Loader

[Dave]

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