A Brief Look at BIOS and CMOS

    I generally need to verify that the disks and CDROM are seen by the BIOS at power up for no other reason than to confirm functionality.  With this machine we simply hook up some standard PC style keyboard and any old two button mouse.  It is even better to have a three button mouse and I have a Labtec mouse here which cost nine dollars I think.  For a monitor I had an old NEC MultiSync XV17 unit that will probably never die.  When I turn on the power this is what I see :


System BIOS Report

    Pressing the F1 key results in the system CMOS Setup Utility being run for me.  This machine will not have much for me to configure from the perspective of hardware.  Really, a discussion about CMOS configuration of PC hardware is beyond the scope of this document.  That is a nice way of saying that I can not begin to cover off the myrid possibilities that you will run into with your system.  I want to show you what I have here regardless.


CMOS Setup Utility - Main Page

    It is good policy to at least set the time and date correctly here.   I also strongly suggest that you verify that your hard disk is listed as a “Primary Master”.   My machine here has two hard disks and thus you can see that the “Maxtor” disk is listed as a “Primary Slave”.  Again, I think that talking about the nuances of IDE controllers and the setup of master and slave disks is a little beyond the scope here but you should at least know that the old Western Digital 2.5GB disk is useless and being removed.  If I set the maxtor to be the master disk on the IDE bus then we should be fine.

    Have a close look at that “CMOS Setup Utility” picture above.  See that device listed as a “Secondary Slave”?  That is my CDROM drive and it is really critical to this process.  This entire installation will be based on the five Solaris 10 Update 3 CDROMs and not a DVD or network based installation.  If you have a DVD drive then life will be really easy.  This installation document is for the lowest common denominator user however and most people have at least a CDROM.  Network based installs and things like PXE boot are just too involved at this stage of the game for most people.  Those topics will be covered off in another document.  For now you merely need to ensure that your system can detect your hard disk and that you have a CDROM and some other very basic features in your machine.  Like memory for instance.  

    This machine has 512MB of RAM and while you can probably run with less than that I strongly suggest that you have at least 512MB of RAM.  Solaris is a big freight train powerful operating system and not to be underestimated in its abilities.  So please ensure that you have the basic resources for it to work.  Having said that please forgive me but 512MB is too low by my standards.  I will pop in another 256MB DIMM and then have 768MB memory total.


CMOS Setup Utility - Advanced Page

    There are pitfalls to messing with the “advanced” CMOS configuration options.  I was primarily interested in seeing that my onboard LAN Network card was enabled as well as some recognition paid to the installed AGP graphics adapter.  I have the “Plug and Play OS” option left at the default and I also disabled the “USB Legacy Mode support” option.  Primarily because I don't have any USB devices to connect legacy or otherwise so why bother to support some special feature for something that I don't have?  Seems to be common sense.  With that in mind I change nothing else and simply hit the F10 key to “Save and exit” from the CMOS Setup Utility.

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