Sorry, 1) I was unable to avoid the varying fonts and font sizes in my first posting in this thread. If the administrator of this forum wants to make the fonts and font sizes constant throughout that posting, that would be fine with me. 2) I think I left out an explicit outline of a plan I hope could be made workable for my purpose of making and restoring the backups of data on numerous partitions of my internal hard-disk drive, perhaps using the free program PING (Partimage Is Not Ghost, available from
http://www.windowsdream.com/ping on the Internet). With one set of instructions one can deal with multiple partitions in one execution of PING, a convenient feature of that program. If my outline looks vague, it is because I still don't know a lot about some things so that I may be writing a bit "over my head." Please note to avoid possible confusion: In my ideal plan below I list in parentheses some of the things I can't do now with my computer and the program PING. Outside the parentheses I discuss elements of the ideal plan.
Ideal plan that I hope might be workable:
i) USB (Universal Serial Bus) drive appearing as an additional option in my year-2003 BIOS's (Basic Input Output System's) boot screen. I presume this would be a result of I suppose a PCI (Peripheral Component Interconnect) option ROM (Read Only Memory) being written into that BIOS after somehow generating that PCI option ROM from the file plpbt.rom by a sample command of the form "plpbtrom -vendorid 0x10ec -deviceid 0x8139 plpbtrom.bin plpbt.rom" (Also I don't yet know exactly what to do between generating the file plpbt.rom and writing the PCI option ROM into my computer's BIOS.).
ii) Then after powering on my computer I would like to be able to choose USB from the BIOS boot options to run PING by booting the Linux operating system that appears with it, with both PING and that Linux operating system located on a USB-cabled, external, hard-disk drive. (Presently my computer's BIOS does not list a USB drive as a bootable drive.) My untested hope is that the so-started PING would then show not only the USB-cabled hard-disk drive on which it would ideally be located, but also the partitions (on the other side of the USB cable) of the hard-disk drive inside my notebook computer. (By booting PING from a PING "live" CD spinning in my computer's internal, DVD [Digital Video Disc] drive, PING 3.01 did not "list" an external, USB-cabled, hard-disk drive as a drive it could "use.") If that would all be successful, then I should be able to make and restore backups of data from multiple partitions of the internal hard-disk drive between the external, USB-cabled, hard-disk drive and an internal hard-disk drive.
Of secondary importance would be to be able to use all 160 GigaBytes (GB) of my computer's internal hard-disk drive. Until recently I thought that my computer's BIOS was limited to 28-bit Logical Block Addressing (LBA), which if so could in turn limit the accessible portion of my internal hard-disk drive to 137.44 GB, as discussed at
http://www.thestarman.narod.ru/asm/mbr/Limits.htm on the Internet.---When I first started using that 160-GB hard-disk drive in January of the year 2009, its capacity was shown as either only 128 GiB (GibiBytes) or 128 GB instead of 160 GB (Back in January of 2009 I may not have known exactly what the difference was between GiB and GB; but gratefully now I do.). However, as I mentioned earlier in this thread, the program GParted {GNOME (GNU [Gnu's Not Unix] Network Object Model Environment) Partition Editor} on a "live" CD listed all 160 GB of my internal, hard-disk drive's capacity. In a few days I hope to have the necessary hardware for a 250-GB, USB-cabled, external hard-disk drive for my notebook computer, a drive I hope to be able to use for making and restoring backups of data on my internal hard-disk drive. Perhaps after formatting that external drive in the ext3 file system I may be able to see if a file manager in my openSUSE-12.1 Linux operating system will show that drive's capacity as 250 GB or 137 GB while using my present BIOS, unless I am able to get the PCI option ROM produced and written into that BIOS before then.
Now a major challenge for me is determining what vendor and device identifications (ids) I should be using for "something PCI" in my computer in the command of the form "plpbtrom -vendorid 0x10ec -deviceid 0x8139 plpbtrom.bin plpbt.rom."
Today's question 1a: Keeping in mind my goal of in my BIOS using a "PCI option ROM" to enable the booting of a USB-1.1-cabled, hard-disk drive containing an operating system and the program PING, for what device should I be determining the vendor and device ids? For example, in openSUSE-12.1's YaST2's (Yet another Software Tool 2's) "Hardware Information" under "PCI" I saw VT82xxxxx UHCI USB 1.1 controller," and probably not immediately below that "Device identifier (spec): 65570" and "Device identifier: 77880"; and then further down under "Resources" I found something similar to "Vendor identifier: 69894" and "Vendor: VIA Technologies, Inc.", "Subvendor Identifier: 69692," and "Subvendor: Hewlett Packard Co." Do any of those descriptions and numbers match parts of what I would need for the values of the parameters "-vendorid" and "-deviceid" in the command of the form "plpbtrom -vendorid 0x10ec -deviceid 0x8139 plpbtrom.bin plpbt.rom" to generate the file plpbt.rom for I suppose a PCI option ROM?
Today's question 1b: If I learn for what device I should be searching for the vendor id and device id, how may I determine those values for my computer?
Today's question 1c: Once one has the preliminary device id and vendor id is there some formula or conversion one has to use to obtain the vendor and device ids in forms that look like 0x...... and 0x......?
Today's question 1d: If so, what is that formula or conversion procedure?
Today's question 1e: Is a conversion from a decimal to a hexadecimal number involved in such a conversion?
In this particular posting I avoided asking about the less-than-ideal plan of using the Plop Boot Manager on a bootable Compact Disc (CD) to make PING and its accompanying operating system bootable when and if they would be located on an external, USB-cabled hard-disk drive. I like the idea of instead improving my BIOS's capabilities, assuming that can be done in a way safe for both it and my computer.
Thanks, Elmar, for kindly posting the hyperlink on option ROM. I did some reading both there and from
http://www.acpica.org/download/specsbbs101.pdf, which mentions PCI. But unfortunately I can't write that I understood well everything I read from either of those Web sites. Thanks for bearing with me, considering my ignorance of some things.
