HDD & BIOS : why the hell is that so badly designed???

[fullmetalcoder]

@fullmetalcoder:
Why not buy a new mother borad while you are buying a new HDD?
You can certainly do with middle ranged mother board if you are still happy with a 5 years old PC, and it will cost you not more then 50€, but will enable you to have a modern hardware that boots the way you want it.
A PCI SATA controller will not cost that much less then a new motherboard.

And what about buying a new PC ???

I'm not happy at all with my 5 years old PC (not mine actually but it doesn't matter). THe problem lies in two facts : my current HDD is 40 Gb which is quite small to have multiple boot & I don't have that much money to spend for buying new hardware (80€)

BTW, I read in some magazines that a PCI SATA controller costs about 15-20€ and it's much easier to add a PCI card than to remove the old motherboard, reconnect everything (including IDE slots, graphic cards, CPU and RAM)

@wysota : sounds like Gran'Pa kicked your as!

[wysota]

my current HDD is 40 Gb which is quite small to have multiple boot & I don't have that much money to spend for buying new hardware

Why not invest in a DVD-burner? (50€)

@wysota : sounds like Gran'Pa kicked your as!

Did he? He didn't say it doesn't suck and I didn't say it didn't use to do its job well at the time it was designed. It just wasn't designed with intention to handle all those nifty gadgets available nowadays. And it shouldn't need to handle them anyway... It should just be able to boot the machine. Nothing more. No tweaking, device discovery, temprature monitoring, time setting -- nothing. It can all be done elsewhere and each device should be able to autoconfigure itself on the hardware level (like memory speed, etc.)

The amount of legacy solutions in PC computers (and I don't like PC computers at all) is just plain silly. And Micro$oft is doing the same (mistake) on software level, too.

[GreyGeek]

Did he? He didn't say it doesn't suck and I didn't say it didn't use to do its job well at the time it was designed. It just wasn't designed with intention to handle all those nifty gadgets available nowadays. And it shouldn't need to handle them anyway... It should just be able to boot the machine. Nothing more. No tweaking, device discovery, temprature monitoring, time setting -- nothing. It can all be done elsewhere and each device should be able to autoconfigure itself on the hardware level (like memory speed, etc.)

The amount of legacy solutions in PC computers (and I don't like PC computers at all) is just plain silly. And Micro$oft is doing the same (mistake) on software level, too.

You're correct, wysota. I don't deliberately try to abuse anyone. I was just giving info on the history of the BIOS. Compared with what we had to work with before, the BIOS was a minor miracle.


But, I agree with the rest of your statement. When the BIOS is first powered up it looks at the HD controller card for a 512 byte section of code that contains the boot loader code. That code loads the "DOS" (Disk Operating System) off of the HD and gives control back to the BIOS. The BIOS continues loading the ring0 interrupts from its EPROM space into RAM. There are 1024 ring0 interrupt vectors, which are now called "ports", and the rest of the ports above 1024 are for less secure ring use. Good Terminate and Stay Resident (TSR) programs, what we now call "services", treat the vectors as pointers by replacing the original interrupt calling address with its own memory address and then passing on to the calling function the original vector address that the BIOS loaded, IF it didn't handle the call itself.

Those "services" can control who gets access to the orignal vectors and their capabilities. Microsoft, primarily, is pushing "Trusted Computing" (TC, aka Treacherous Computing or corporate "Digital Rights Management", NOT your rights) in order to control how your PC can be used by you with THEIR permission, of course. DRM or TC or what ever the name deJour, is merely TSR with a vengence, burned into hardware and encrypted so they can't be bypassed even at the hardware level. Total "ball and chain" enslavement. Their goal is to treat you like mushrooms..er.. consumers, by keeping you in the dark and feeding you sh**. Their EULAs have stripped all of your rights away. Your only job is to give them your money, use their crappy software, and keep your mouth shut.

You don't own Windows. If DRM gets into place you won't own your PC, either. Citizens of former USSR client states know what it's like to have someone else tell you what you can and cannot do in every aspect of your lives, because the "state" owns everything, including you. The State tells you where you can live, how much you'll pay for rent, what jobs you can do and how much you'll be paid to do them - regardless of your skill sets, when you can have bread or meat, what kinds of clothes, appliances, books, magizines,etc. that you can buy. In the Brave New World of PCs envisioned by Bill Gates, he and other corporate heads dictate to you what you can an cannot do with your PCs, even when you are not running any of their devices or watching their movies. They are the "State". You are the slaves.

There. I feel a little better now.

[Brandybuck]

I'm glad you got that off your chest...