Mainboard BIOS upgrade without Windows or floppy drive

cdunham

How the *&%*&^ are you supposed to do this?

I've stopped putting floppy drives in new machines because they are useless anachronisms.

I've stopped using Windows because it is an expensive useless anachronism.

But now I've got some motherboards (Intel and Gigabyte, mainly) that need BIOS upgrades, and the only formats I can find are DOS images for bootable floppy drives! WTF?!! (/me checks calendar, yes it's 2004)

Even the Intel site has this amusing little statement:

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Sat Jul 17, 2004 4:20 pm Post subject:

cdunham,

Make a bootable CD with everything you need inthe bootable image.
You won't be able to do a backup of the old FLASH image becase you DOS won't be writeable.

You will need DOS though
_________________
Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

cdunham · Posted: Sat Jul 17, 2004 4:54 pm Post subject:

Yeah, I was trying to do the same thing with a flash drive. I was able to use unzip to open the Intel download in Linux, but it contains a diskimage and executable that REQUIRES DOS/Windows and even then, will only write to A: or B: . I'm trying to figure out a way to remap the flash drive in Windows to A: and/or create a virtual image I would then copy over. It looks like the bootable floppy will also expect it's the A: drive, and runs DOS executables. Sheesh!
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cspos · n00b Joined: 11 Jul 2004 Posts: 60

Instead of installing a full fledged DOS OS, you should be able to just boot the computer up with a Windows startup floppy, and then run the update from another floppy. Since you don't have a floppy drive in that computer, you could just transfer the images to CD, like Neddy said.

goulash · Posted: Wed Aug 04, 2004 2:40 pm Post subject:

use a win98 boot disk because that has dos on it, but then you need a fat partition to have the bios flash util on...

Nate_S · Guru Joined: 18 Mar 2004 Posts: 414

These two sites should be helpful. the first is specific to making a boot cd for flashing in linux, the second is written from a windows standpoint but it uses ported things like dd.exe and mkisofs.exe. It also contains some very detailed info about how exactly boot cds work.

http://www.nenie.org/misc/flashbootcd.html

http://www.nu2.nu/bootcd/

If you need to be able to save things such as a back up of the current image, you might consider making a ten meg dos partition on your hard disk (which you might also make bootable, instead of the cd method)

-Nate