🚀 go-pugleaf

Adam Carheden (carheden@holly.colostate.edu) wrote:


:   I swapped some old 286 AT bioses without ill effect.
: >As far as I know, you can plug them in and see what happens.  Obviously,
: >you should swap them between similar machines -- ie, a 286 bios won't work
: >in a 386.

:     Not so obvious to me.  All I know is what the BIOS acronym stands for,
: but I'm stil unsure as to what it DOES.  That's why I asked though.

Well, I'm not so sure I know what BIOS stands for, but what it does is provide
a standard interface between your operating system and the hardware, or atleast
it did in the DOS days. This way if you wanted to just printf some text to
the screen your application didn't need to know if there was a CGA or VGA or
a monochrome video card installed. Your program simply called some INT 21
function (DOS) which inturn called some INT 10 (BIOS) function to actually
spread the pixels on the screen. Mostly replaced by device drivers now.

The BIOS's job at power up is to figure out what hardware is in the system,
but only simple hardware, floppies, hard disks, serial and parallel ports, 
and the amount of RAM installed. If you ever have to do some assembly 
language programming then knowing the BIOS functions is really handy. There
is a guy named Ralph Brown that has a very extensive description of BIOS
functions and such. Search for Ralph Brown Interrupt List if your interested.

But for your more immediate problem, I don't have any new ideas. I would have
thought that resetting the CMOS would have made it unhappy enough to ask
for you to correct it at power up. Same thing happens when the CMOS battery
runs out of juice, forgets what the harddrive settings were.

-- 
                 Mike House 
 Computer Science Colorado State University
Commuting and Telecommuting from Loveland, CO
     http://www.cs.colostate.edu/~house