Re: Need to buy Windows to flash a BIOS?

On Mon, 23 Oct 2006 23:26:02 -0400, TonyTheJavaTiger wrote:

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.


don't think that this method is 'floppy' oriented.... but you can still
use the freedos image... you just need to use 2 floppies. Put the
fdboot.img file on one floppy and boot with that. Put the other files you
need on a 2nd floppy and load that when needed.



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?


It's the thing your going to flash on your motherboard. In this example
it's BIOS.img. In my case, for an ABIT motherboard it was: KN8_19.BIN.
You have to adjust the instrcutions as necessary.


* 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 ?

loop is pretty useful... I use it a lot. the loop back device is similar
to a virtual device. You can mount the thing that you'd burn to a real
drive ( floppy .img or a cd .iso image ) and then you can access the files
on the loop device just like you inserted the drive in your pc. i.e. you
can mount the FC5 DVD .iso ( 4gig-ish .iso ) on your /mnt/cdrom mount
point and not need to burn a 4gig dvd.


* 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.

.... doesn't matter... it's just a temporary mount point. You could use
/mnt/foo or even /use/local/src/src/asdf. doesn't matter what you call
it... what your doing is mounting the floppy.img somewhere so you
can add files to it.....

instead of cp -a FLASH.EXE BIOS.IMG /mnt/floppy/ I ran
cp -a bootcd_include_files/* /mnt/floppy/
because I unpacked the bios bin and flash utility I needed for my
motherboard in the bootcd_include_files directory.


* 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 !

..... you mounted the fdboot.img on your loop back device ( virtualfloppy )
and THEN you copied the FLASH.EXE and BIOS.IMG. It doesn't mention it
again because it is now PART of the fdboot.img.... it's in there....

If your floppy could handle the size, you'd dd the new fdboot.img with the
additional files to your floppy. In this case, the example assumes your
making a bootable cd so it says to copy it to the cdrom directory it
assumed you created.


* 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.

.... I altered the suggested script a bit to:

bunzip2 -c fdboot.img.bz2 > fdboot.img
mount -o loop -t msdos fdboot.img /mnt/floppy
cp -a bootcd_include_files/* /mnt/floppy/
umount /mnt/floppy
mkdir -p cdrom/boot
mv fdboot.img cdrom/boot/boot.img
mkisofs -r -b boot/boot.img -c boot/boot.catalog -o bootcd.iso cdrom/
#cdrecord blank=fast
#cdrecord -dao -eject -v bootcd.iso


....since I do a mkdir -p cdrom/boot and don't change from that directory...
the mkisofs works because it goes from the current directory... where..
cdrom/ is a sub directory.

I could have used:
mkdir -o /usr/local/src/foo
mv fdboot.img /usr/local/src/foo/boot/boot.img
mkisofs -r -b boot/boot.img -c boot/boot.catalog -o \
bootcd.iso usr/local/src/foo

the last argument to mkisofs is just the name of the directoy you
are using... you can call it what ever you want.... cdrom, foo, joe, etc.



* 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.
true... won't hurt on a non cd-rw media.


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

bootable cd's are pretty slick... but they are not strait forward. You
can't just copy some files to a CD and boot it. The bootable cd has a
'floppy' ... can be a BIG floppy... but it's still a 'floppy' image
on it in a specific location. The CDROM specification tells the
computer when it boots to load the cdrom and look in a specific
location for a specific type of file. If it's there, it will load that
file and pretend it's a floppy. I don't have an a: drive / floppy but
when I boot this bootable cd... I can do a: and get an a> prompt.
As far as the system is concerned, I have a read-only A: drive.

even though this is a bootable cd... you boot freedos with this,
it ask you if you want to load the cdrom driver. You can say no
and you end up with just an A: drive ( that happens to be a cd )
If you load the cdrom drive, it detects your CD and then you get
an A: and a C: drive. It's optional if you want to load the cd
driver... in this example.. of the bootable cd.. you copied your
bios flashing stuff to A: so you don't need to load the CD part.


hope that answered some questions... I didn't write any of this...
just found the freshrpms.net page when I googled for flashing a
bios from linux. I've just been using Linux for a long time and
know about bootable cds and loop back devices... makes perfect
sense to me. ;)

--
D.A.M. - Mothers Against Dyslexia

see http://www.jacksnodgrass.com for my contact info.

jack - Grapevine/Richardson
.

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