The Death of DOS and BIOS Updates?

Mike Hicks asks: "The release of Windows XP was heralded by Microsoft as the Death of DOS. No longer is everything riding on command.com and friends. However, most BIOS update utilities -- whether for motherboards or DVD drives -- are still written to work under DOS. Certainly, a lot of DOS boot diskettes are squirreled away all over the place, but they are going to disappear over time. What will we be using in the next few years to update firmware? Do adequate non-DOS solutions exist now?" I would hope that maybe BIOS updates would then be distributed as disk images that would boot you right into the update utility, however more than likely there will be a Windows XP utility to do this. Here's hoping, however, that an OS-neutral solution presents itself in the future.

Comments

Flash program built into BIOS

[DeadMeat (TM)]

Most new motherboards I've seen have BIOS flashing programs actually built into the BIOS. You don't need any OS, just a floppy with the BIOS image on it. My guess is this is where the industry is headed, since flashing motherboard BIOSes in Windows is a little dicey.

Incidentally, Windows-based flashing programs for DVD and CD-RW firmware have been here for quite some time. I know that Pioneer, Mitsumi, Lite-On, and Ricoh use them, and I'm sure plenty of others do too.

Why do you need dos?

[Cylix]

Some tyan motherboards I know of do not require an operating system to flash with.

All is needed is to insert a floppy with a rom image stored in it. Choose whatever particular method you decide.

On boot, if you are holding a specific key, it scan's the floppy drive for an image. If the image is intact, it will update the bios from the image.

I seem to recall some sparc and digital hardware doing this as well. Compaq has a great deal of floppies that have an entire environment to do such fun things. The compaq stuff rides on top of dos.