WARNING: Knoppix killed the BIOS on my Dell Optiplex

**joef** · 09-06-2003, 04:29 PM

**ktheking** · 09-06-2003, 10:52 PM

Remember IBM laptops ?
These bastards integrated encoding chip which pre-encoded their harddisks (before accessing it with any OS). Their were even models were THE BIOS was put on the Harddisk. If you had the misfortune to format your disk together with part that contained you BIOS ,you could kill your pc. Maybe dell did this too ?

Did you already try to use the Boot on LAN option to push knoppix trough the LAN on your Dell ? (for example clusterknoppix stuff)

For memory management , I can consider Dell pc's and Packard Bell pc's the worst of their kind. Mainly they use shared memory (VIDEO+SYSTEM)
Maybe this could be a source of your problems. In this case a solution could be to search for BIOS upgrades. Check out http://www.motherboards.org/

greetzz and good luck

**A. Jorge Garcia** · 09-08-2003, 10:30 PM

I've been reading on the web. It seems that the onboard intel video and audio chips actually share the RAM. If the BIOS does too....

Regards,

**j.drake** · 09-15-2003, 04:14 PM

On a related note, please see my post here about my HP box:

http://www.knoppix.net/forum/viewtop...?p=22566#22566

**sancho** · 10-08-2003, 09:19 PM

Originally Posted by reecegeorge

could be someone from m$

It's not M$ FUD this time...

I'll vouch for the problem. Knoppix scared the shiznit outta me when my Dimension 4550 didn't come back after shutting down my first run of Knoppix.

I thought for sure it had fizzled my shizzle: powering up, the keyboard lights would come on, but the drives wouldn't spin up or anything. no video signal, no bios message, nothing. Just whirring fans.

But aay was right: unplug the power and hold down the power button, and it all comes back. I figure there must be some extra "shut your bad ass down" command in Knoppix that the Dell machines take a little _too_ literally. Dunno for sure, though. If anybody who can't reproduce the problem wants more info, or want me to try something, I'm game. Sign me up to test a fixed version as well. Knoppix is the bomb, give or take hosing my system for a few days until I got around to checking this forum.

**aay** · 10-09-2003, 12:19 AM

Originally Posted by sancho

Originally Posted by reecegeorge

could be someone from m$

It's not M$ FUD this time...

I'll vouch for the problem. Knoppix scared the shiznit outta me when my Dimension 4550 didn't come back after shutting down my first run of Knoppix.

I thought for sure it had fizzled my shizzle: powering up, the keyboard lights would come on, but the drives wouldn't spin up or anything. no video signal, no bios message, nothing. Just whirring fans.

But aay was right: unplug the power and hold down the power button, and it all comes back. I figure there must be some extra "shut your bad ass down" command in Knoppix that the Dell machines take a little _too_ literally. Dunno for sure, though. If anybody who can't reproduce the problem wants more info, or want me to try something, I'm game. Sign me up to test a fixed version as well. Knoppix is the bomb, give or take hosing my system for a few days until I got around to checking this forum.

I'm glad you found the fix. It's really easy, but only if you know about it. I disturbs me that newbies may be trying out Knoppix on their Dell's and then cursing Knoppix into oblivion when their machine won't reboot. I wish there was another way to deal with this issue as well.

**Stephen** · 10-09-2003, 02:03 AM

Originally Posted by aay

I disturbs me that newbies may be trying out Knoppix on their Dell's and then cursing Knoppix into oblivion when their machine won't reboot. I wish there was another way to deal with this issue as well.

Me too there seem to be so many Dell's with these buggy BIOS's that a warning should be somewhere in the startup screen.

**sancho** · 10-10-2003, 03:12 AM

Is there any way I can shut Knoppix down with some set of options or flags or something, so that it runs the shutdown commands one at a time?

Presumably the last one I see is the one that kills the machine, right?

Or maybe I could comment out blocks of shutdown commands, shutting down, fixing my shiznit, booting up and shutting down again until I can figure out which command is doing it...

Any tips from Knoppix gurus? I'm gonna go "man shutdown" now (damn.. that sounds kinky, somehow) and see what I can figure out, but additional thought or advice are both greatly appreciated.

**knoppixman** · 01-05-2004, 04:15 PM

Originally Posted by A. Jorge Garcia

OK, now I have 25 Dell Optiplex GX270s (PIV 2.4Ghz, 770MB ram, 40GB hdd, etc). But these machines have some sort of intel integrated video and audio chips. I get no sound and only 640x480 res!

Help, what can I do with this. I'm booting the CD and trying all kinds of cheats to no avail!

Frustrated,

Go into their BIOS and into the "Integrated Peripherals" section and change the silly "1 MB" default to "8 MB" and you will no longer have problems getting more than 640x480 using their onboard video chips.