BIOS Implementation Test Suite and reference code

This file contains installation instructions only. See boot/README.txt for documentation on using BITS.

For more information about BITS, including the latest version and the source code, see the BITS homepage at biosbits.org/

To boot BITS, you need to create a bootable BITS disk. You can construct this disk in one of two ways, depending on how you want to use the resulting disk:

This distribution includes a pre-built .iso image, which you can burn to a CD or image onto a USB disk to produce a bootable BITS disk. This option lets you create bootable BITS media more quickly and easily, but does not allow you to modify the disk after creating it. For more information, refer to the section "Using the pre-constructed read-only BITS disk image".
If you want to add or edit files in the BITS distribution, upgrade your disk to subsequent versions of BITS more easily, or use a USB disk to store data other than BITS, then you can use the "boot" directory in this distribution to construct a bootable USB disk which supports subsequent modification. For this procedure, refer to the section "Constructing a bootable BITS USB disk supporting subsequent modification".

Using the pre-constructed read-only BITS disk image

This distribution includes a pre-built .iso image. You can burn this image onto a CD using any standard CD burning software for your platform. Please note that you need to burn the .iso as an image; you should end up with a CD containing a "boot" directory, not a CD containing the .iso file.

Thanks to deep magic provided by GRUB, the same .iso file also works as a bootable USB disk image. If you image the .iso file directly to a USB disk (the whole disk, not a partition), you'll end up with a bootable USB disk. On Linux, try "dd if=bits-NNN.iso of=/dev/sdX"; replace bits-NNN.iso with the versioned BITS iso, and sdX with your disk device, and remember to umount it first. On Windows, you might try "dd for Windows". In both cases, make sure you refer to the correct disk device for your USB disk, not your system's hard disk. Note that this procedure will overwrite any data on your USB disk. Also note that this constructs a USB disk containing an ISO9660 filesystem as a partition, which operating systems do not normally expect to see; you might have some trouble reading it from within your OS, and you definitely cannot write to it.

If you want to try out BITS within a virtual machine, you can tell your VM to use the .iso file either as a disk image or a CD image. For KVM, you can run "kvm -cdrom bits-NNN.iso" to boot BITS via CD. Note that most hardware-specific tests will not run in a virtual machine, but some of the general tests will work. If you find out interesting things about either BITS or your VM in the process, we'd love to hear about it.

Constructing a bootable BITS USB disk supporting subsequent modification

This procedure creates a bootable USB disk. You will need a USB disk with a reasonable amount of space (enough to hold the boot directory present in this distribution, plus a little slack space). Your USB disk should have a FAT32 partition.

If your USB disk contains any data that you care about, back it up now. No really. There will be a test later.

Note that if you have previously followed this procedure to create a bootable BITS USB disk, you can upgrade to a new version of BITS by deleting the "boot" directory from the root of the USB disk and copying the "boot" directory from this BITS .zip distribution to the root of the USB disk. You must delete the old directory first; copying the new directory over the old will not remove obsolete files, and will thus break in subtle ways. If this procedure works for you, you don't need to follow the remaining steps in this section; if you need to construct a new BITS USB disk, read on.

Make sure you know the correct device name for your USB disk, so you don't write to your system's hard disk instead.

Go get syslinux from <www.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/boot/syslinux/>, or install the package provided by your Linux distribution; download the latest version and extract it somewhere you can find from the command line. The syslinux distribution includes binaries for various platforms, including Linux, Windows, and DOS.

The remaining instructions will require a command prompt; open one, and cd to this directory (containing this INSTALL.txt file and the boot directory). Under Windows, when the commands below refer to a program, you will need to give the path to the executable, wherever you extracted it.

To build a bootable USB disk, you will need a USB disk with a FAT32 partition. A partitionless USB disk with no partition table and a FAT32 filesystem directly on the disk, sometimes called a "superfloppy", will *not* work. If you have such a disk, you must partition it so that it has a partition table and a FAT32 partition. For Linux, try gparted. For Windows, the "HP USB disk
storage format tool" can do this; you can find that tool at <downloads.pcworld.com/pub/new/utilities/peripherals/SP27608.exe>. Run it, choose your USB disk (the tool should not let you choose your system hard disk), and choose "FAT32". The volume label does not matter. Do not check "Create a DOS startup disk"; this procedure will make the disk bootable, but it will boot something *much* more awesome than DOS.

Now, copy the boot directory to the root of that drive.

For Windows, run: xcopy /s boot u:\boot\
Change "u:" to the drive letter of your USB disk.

For Linux, run: cp -r boot /media/disk/
Change /media/disk to the mount point of your USB disk.

Now, you need to make the disk bootable with syslinux.

For Windows, run: syslinux.exe -m -a u:
Change "syslinux.exe" to the path to the syslinux executable for your platform, and "u:" to the drive letter of your USB disk

For Linux, run: syslinux /dev/sdb1
Change "/dev/sdb1" to the device name of the partition on your USB disk. Take care not to syslinux your system hard disk. You will also need to set the boot flag on the partition containing BITS; gparted can do that. Finally, you need to install an MBR that will boot the bootable partition; the syslinux package includes an "mbr.bin" which will work. To install that MBR to the USB disk, run: cat /usr/lib/syslinux/mbr.bin > /dev/sdb
Change /dev/sdb to the device name of your USB disk, Note that your syslinux distribution may install mbr.bin somewhere else.

You should now have a bootable USB disk. You can read README.txt in the boot directory of that disk for more information on the BITS toolkit.

Note that BITS boots via the standard BIOS boot procedure for USB disks. BITS does not support native EFI booting; to test an EFI BIOS, please boot via the compatibility support module (CSM).