[ltp] Scared about BIOS update

[Ignacio Fernández Galván]

Hi all,

I have a R51 (1829-R6G), two months ago, when I got it, I just resized the  
ntfs partition, deleted the pre-desktop area and installed Mandrake 10.1,  
no real problems here.

One of the issues I noticed is I can't get rid of the windows OS loader. I  
installed grub not on the MBR but on hda3, set hda3 to be the active  
partition and it didn't boot, just complained about "No OS found". When I  
copied the hda3 boot record to the Windows root directory, modified  
boot.ini and set hda1 back to the active partition, it booted without  
problem... Am I missing something here? I want to keep windows, I don't  
want to touch the MBR but I want to use just grub.

Now, hoping it could be fixed with a BIOS update (wishful thinking, I  
know), I tried doing that. So I booted in windows, dowloaded the 3.14 BIOS  
and tried... Windows shut down and there was a message like "Gathering  
information. This may take some seconds". After about 15 minutes with this  
message I was already scared, but I decided I had to power-off. So, I did  
a hard reboot and everything looks OK, but I'm still scared.

If I remember correctly, after I deleted the pre-desktop area, pressing  
AccessIBM at boot time just did nothing, but I could enter the BIOS setup  
fine with F11. Now, when I press AccessIBM I get an infinite loop of  
"replace disk and press any key" or something similar. I can enter the  
BIOS with F11, but when I exit from it I get the same message, so I have  
to do a hard reboot again.

As I said, the system seems to be working basically fine, but I'm worried  
I could have screwed up the boot process or something. I'd like to have a  
cleaner, more elegant behaviour at boot time than the one I described  
before. And I'd like to be able to eventually upgrade the BIOS... Any  
ideas about what has happened? And how to "fix" it?

Thanks in advance