Last Saturday I went into my son’s room for some reason and my son mentioned that his iPod’s battery was almost dead despite having been connected to his computer for a long time. He thought our cat, Chewie, might have broken it. Chewie thought the iPod was a cat toy until we corrected him. I wasn’t convinced that the iPod was broken since everything else worked. I tried a few things on his computer and then connected the iPod to my computer. I charge my Blackberry and my Muvo without problems on my computer. In a few minutes the iPod showed a significant increase in the battery charge. After a little internet searching the Apple site said that some USB connections do not provide power. Since my son’s desktop computer has a much newer motherboard I was a little surprised. So I decided to see if I could get his USB connections to provide power.
Boy was that a mistake! I checked the MSI website but I did not find any info. The Bios was not current and the website said that the latest release improved USB connectivity. So I decided to upgrade the Bios. I downloaded the Bios, started the upgrade, and the first thing it wants is a floppy drive. I did not install a floppy drive on his computer. They wanted the floppy drive to boot from. The Bios flash updater runs under DOS so I decided to provide a CD-ROM alternative. The first bootable CD-ROM ISO with FreeDOS did not boot. So I got a second one, FreeDOS Lite. It is bilingual with a preference for German but it booted and I got my DOS prompt. Then I realized that I needed a FAT or FAT32 partition. So I went back created the partition and copied the Bios files over to it. I rebooted the machine back into FreeDOS again and the flashed the Bios without a problem.
When I got back into W2K it found some unknown hardware. That’s typically not good. I decided to upgrade the Nvidia drivers with WHQL drivers from Nivida. That’s when things went really bad! When I rebooted I got the blue screen of death. Another boot later it said I did not have a boot drive. I searched for info on the internet but finally gave up. I booted from the W2K installation CD-ROM and went into recovery console and ran chkdsk to fix any problems. That took a long time to run. Then I ran FIXMBR. It said I had a non-standard signature so I let it fix it. I rebooted and everything is fine including the Nvidia drivers. Whew, that was messy! I have had real good luck with Bios upgrades in the past so I am a little surprised. I think I don’t care if his iPod gets charged anymore.