Cross Platform BIOS Flash Upgrades?

niko9 asks: "I am a Linux user who lives in an all Linux household. I build all my Linux boxes from components that I know will play nice with Linux. I was recently contemplating building a box with a Tyan Tiger K8W dual-Opteron motherboard, as the original BIOS did not provide support for the built-in Intel Gigabit NIC. Tyan has since released a BIOS revision, but the instructions for flashing the BIOS explicitly state that you need a Windows 95/98 boot disk. As someone who doesn't know anyone who runs Windows 98, nor do I own any copies of any Microsoft operating system, how does someone complete the delicate task of a BIOS upgrade? Wasn't Windows 98 recently retired? An email to Tyan's tech support has so far not yielded any response. When will motherboard manufacturers realize that upgrading your BIOS is better off being a neutral OS event? Does anyone know of any motherboard maker that doesn't require a specific OS to flash a BIOS?" A simple solution is to not fight the requirement. Windows and DOS bootdisks are readily available on the Internet, and all you need to do is grab a floppy, write the image to it, and put it in a safe place for such occasions. The gist of the question is still valid, however: what will it take to get BIOS manufacturers to make an OS neutral BIOS upgrade path?

Comments

I'm curious,

[nocomment]

Why couldn't they make a bootable downloadable iso image? Sure you lose a CD, but really, the last time I used a floppy it was just to upgrade the BIOS. I know OpenBSD has a really small downloadable iso for netowork installs. They could use a similar thing, but instead of formatting drives, and installing an OS, it could just boot and run the BIOS flash program. Easy, os agnostic, wouldn't require any work once the bootable image was done.

Re:I'm curious,

[M1FCJ]

For some servers, IBM does this. Even better, the ISO image is actually a small linux distro, which is much better than having a small floppy. Downside is last time I updated some SCSI BIOS on an IBM server, I downloaded an 300MB image. It does more than that but I only needed to upgrade one single component, not the whole operating system.

Gigabyte

[Merlin42]

I have a gigabyte ga-7vaxp. It will has a section in the bios menu that allows you to flash the bios from a fat formated floppy before the os boots. Very nice, if you still have a floppy drive (my current system is floppy-free).

If manufactures wanted to be really slick...

[Sevn]

They could pop a tcp/ip stack and a dhcp client on a chip so you could do a network download/install of a new bios from the motherboard bios menu. This assumes you have some sort of NAT and dhcpd network and a built in NIC or wireless adapter. It's common enough that it would make life easier for a lot of people. Especially corporate environments.

Re:Buy another board

[Sprinkels]

My Asus (A7V333) board has an BIOS update program built into the BIOS.

Press Alt-F2 during the POST and insert a floppy with the BIOS image file. Updated my BIOS a few weeks a go.

Asus has some documentation on their website

Don't know if will work without a normal floppy drive.

Asus P4B533

[Hes Nikke]

my P4B533 (always off, as it's an expensive space heater) has a feature called ASUS EZ Flash. it does exactly what you're looking for, it flashes the BIOS before any OS loads.

'course i've been too timid to try it out :P