It took quite a while to get a boot floppy to install the BIOS update for my MegaRAID 150-6 card. A combination of finding a working floppy, floppy drive, and a way to write a suitable DOS boot disk, and then get it to write the BIOS was quite an ordeal. I thought I had the problem licked with a FreeDOS boot disk and the updater on a CD-RW, but alas, it wouldn’t run. I finally got around this by finding a DR-DOS disk I had as part of a diagnostic disk that would just barely fit the update (and also run it properly).
The update did fix the 48-bit LBA addressing, so it’s now detecting everything correctly. So I’m currently using Knoppix to do a Debian install on the system. A 700+GB home folder is quite a sight.
- Installing Debian Software with the Advanced Package Tool – Getting information about packages – good ref
- Debian Package Tools – list of various tools