Re: Need to buy Windows to flash a BIOS?

Jack Snodgrass wrote:
On Mon, 23 Oct 2006 18:56:54 -0400, TonyTheJavaTiger wrote:


I have to flash my BIOS and the only file Gigabyte provides is an exe. Do I have to buy Windows to flash a BIOS? There's a lot of talk about having the right drivers for printers and video cards, but not much about flashing BIOS, it seems.


see this page
http://freshrpms.net/docs/bios-flash/l
you can use freedos to make a bootable iso cd.

Here seems to be straightforward instructions. Since I have a floppy drive, the instructions are simple:

"Obviously, if you do have a floppy drive, you can just use "dd if=fdboot.img of=/dev/fd0" once you've copied the utility to the floppy image"

But, given the files' size is 1474560 for fdboot.img and 466520 for bios.exe, how come they fit on a floppy?

What does:

2880+0 records in
2880+0 records out

mean when you dd the file? The floppy was not formatted at 2880.

Also, if you can bear with me, I'd like to know a little bit more about the process for using a CD instead. It might come in handy.

---------

"First or all, download this FreeDOS fdboot.img.bz2 compressed boot floppy image. Assuming you have your flash utility FLASH.EXE and BIOS image BIOS.IMG in your current directory, just execute these commands :"

What's BIOS.IMG?

* bunzip2 -c fdboot.img.bz2 > fdboot.img
* mount -o loop -t msdos fdboot.img /mnt/floppy

What's this loop business? Why can't this file be copied straight, just as for the floppy? I suppose /mnt/floppy might as well have been /tmp ?

* cp -a FLASH.EXE BIOS.IMG /mnt/floppy/
* umount /mnt/floppy
* mkdir -p cdrom/boot

Here you make a boot directory in the cdrom directory on your HD. Most probably, if you have /mnt/floppy, it should be /mnt/cdrom.

* mv fdboot.img cdrom/boot/boot.img

Now, you copy fdboot.img as boot.img in your /mnt/cdrom/boot directory. From here on, there's no mention of FLASH.EXE and BIOS.IMG !

* mkisofs -r -b boot/boot.img -c boot/boot.catalog -o bootcd.iso cdrom/

Here... I'm not used to engraving from the command line but, for sure, you better cd /mnt/cdrom before issuing the command.

* cdrecord blank=fast
* cdrecord -dao -eject -v bootcd.iso

"The last couple of lines assume you had a CD-RW media and wanted to blank it."

I would think it's only the line before last.

To tell the truth, the whole process is rather obscure to me.

.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: panteltje.com server down due to technical problem
    ... Reboot, BIOS checksum error, insert system floppy disk.... ... Anyways, I found an old win98 floppy, but how to get that flash utility and BIOS image on it??? ... You can just plug those in the USB of the laptop and can mount it as mass storage device in Linux. ...
    (sci.electronics.design)
  • Re: panteltje.com server down due to technical problem
    ... Reboot, BIOS checksum error, insert system floppy disk.... ... Anyways, I found an old win98 floppy, but how to get that flash utility and BIOS image on it??? ... You can just plug those in the USB of the laptop and can mount it as mass storage device in Linux. ...
    (sci.electronics.design)
  • Re: flash replacing hard disks?
    ... >>to burn a CD-RW to flash a BIOS. ... >>We then tried to install a real floppy drive but we found all floppies ... Floppy drives day is LONG gone IMO, ... Might help for BIOS flash. ...
    (comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.chips)
  • Re: How can I flash the Bios with out a flopy drive?
    ... I use live update and it offers me a bios upgrade that will allow faster socket A processors. ... But it only allows bios flash from floppy in Dos not from windows because I'm using NTFS. ... That whole area of USB bootability is somewhat fraught, I know of at least a ...
    (uk.comp.homebuilt)
  • Re: BIOS upgrade A7V266e Series 2
    ... floppy drive it JUST TODAY occurred to me that the old ... so original problem cause was clearly the PSU and not the BIOS ... So - I don't now need to flash the BIOS, I'll stick with what I have! ... >> problem and ONLY reason for BIOS update is to get support ...
    (alt.comp.periphs.mainboard.asus)