Hacker News Reader

Comment by Wowfunhappy | Hacker News Reader

I legitimately needed to use freeDOS a few months ago in order to downgrade the firmware on my BluRay drive, so I'd be able to rip 4K discs. It could only be done from DOS.

View on HN

Wait...I have a legitimate question (was about to post some snarky comment but now I'm wondering).

WHY did you need DOS??? Use an XP VM? Some sort of Linux emulator? Flashing the firmware on a device manufactured long after the existence of DOS had been forgotten for most major hardware producers...

so many questions!

There’s a lot of firmware flashing stuff that runs on DOS, because it’s easier to have direct access to hardware without the OS trying to access that hardware simultaneously.

The alternative is correctly disabling the device under Windows/Linux/whatever, flashing the firmware, and re-enabling it, which is a process likely to have bugs and potentially result in bricking the device. Modern operating systems are big and constantly doing things in the background that may interfere with the firmware flashing process.

Even DOS doesn't work for most modern hardware. Can't have direct blueray drive access if there is no way to initialize the SATA controller...

The BIOS does it for you.

Not entirely true -- this is the case if the drive is configured as "Enhanced" or "RAID" or "AHCI" in the BIOS/EFI. There's typically a "Legacy" mode which will make the device visible to DOS (and indistinguishable from any other ATA controller).

Well, all I can tell you is that it worked.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com