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

Well,

[Sevn]

I know how I did it. I did a search on google for a "dos boot disk image", found one, downloaded it, then used "dd" to make it. After that it was a matter of mounting the dos floppy and copying my new bios file to it. Reboot, run flash.exe, done.

Buy another board

[jasoncart]

Vote with your feet... if you don't like the manufacturer's apparently alligence to MS then go buy a different make.

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.

Re:Buy another board

[Zathrus]

Oh please.

A "Windows 95/98 boot disk" is nothing but a DOS boot disk. If you don't have DOS or Windows, then just get FreeDOS, an open source version of DOS. It'll work just fine for a boot disk for ROM flashing. There's even a single diskette "distro" that you can download (although, frankly, you don't need anything more than kernel.sys and command.com as best I can tell). They even have a FAQ on this. And two manufacturers (MSI and ASUS) ship it with their utilities.

Good luck finding anyone who will provide a linux flash utility. There are a few manufacturers who will read the BIOS off a floppy disk (Gigabyte), a few that provide DOS or Windows flash utilities, but there's no software that I know of to do Linux flashes, nor is there any support in the kernel to do so (google for it -- there was some work on /dev/bios, but as best I can tell it's a deeply outdated hack now).

It's not "allegience to MS", as much as you might wish your little conspiracy theory to be true. It's called simplicity. Under DOS you don't have to worry about any other process interrupting the BIOS flashing. If another program was to do so, while the BIOS was being overwritten, and happened to need a BIOS call to a location that wasn't shadowed then all hell could break loose. DOS is freaking simple in this way (and before anyone says anything about TSRs -- it's recomended that you not have any loaded).

Quite frankly this is a lame Ask Slashdot. If the original asker had bothered doing any research on the subject they would've discovered a multitude of perfectly legal options available.

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.

Re:I'm curious,

[afay]

Or better yet, why don't they make freedos images that you can just write to a floppy? I can see the reason for not moving to some different os because the bios flash program would need to be rewritten. However, considering there is a free version of dos that doesnt need royalty payments, i would think they would be able to provide floppy images.

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).

Bootdisks

[sdelement-x]

try out http://www.bootdisk.com/ This web site has a range of bootdisks from win95 to win2000 and so on. If you ever need a bootdisk, I'm sure it'll be there.

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.

Oh my god, quitcher bitchin'!

[thenerdgod]

Okay, first off, "offering an .iso of OpenBSD" is the most ridiculous solution I'v ever heard. Why not just ship an EEPROM burner?
How about this: They require a DOS boot floppy because
a: These tools usually operate in real mode
b: DOS is real mode
c: DOS fits on a floppy
d: DOS isn't free

Oh, wait, DOS IS FREE.
STOP WHINING. Your knee-jerk reaction to "this needs DOS" is to think inside the box and whine about how MSFT eats babies and is a monopoly and nobody considers freedom important and TEH LUNIX ROXORZ J00!.
Just get a DOS boot disk from freedos, or any of the other DOS-alikes. That's what I do. It's useful to have around... Sure. In some Magical Future, we won't have floppies or DOS. And then you can burn a FreeDOS .iso, I'm sure.
My god, people, show a little flexibility.

Re:Oh my god, quitcher bitchin'!

[Saiai Hakutyoutani]

If you're so smart, then provide a FreeDOS ISO that works with most BIOS upgrades before yuo start bitching.

Dont Do It!!!

[jcavanaugh]

I tried once to use FreeDos to flash upgrade the bios on a Tyan board. (I also did not have Win98 anywhere in the house).

Big Mistake. It vaporized my bios and I had to resort to unusual methods to recover the board. Fortunately I had 2 of the exact same board, so I was able to remove the bios eproms from both boards and copy from the good one to the corrupted one.

Freedos might be good for a lot of things, but bios flash upgrades isnt one of them...

Caveat Emptor...

--
John Cavanaugh

Re:Forget OS neutral, get rid of floppies!

[BlueBlade]

I'd just like to point out that the successor of floppy disks are NOT cds. If you boot DOS from a cd, you're not going to be able to write to the media and for flashing that means no BIOS back-up. CDs just aren't the solution.

I don't understand why so few seem to know about the "new" floppies, namely the USB memory keys. These things are smaller than floppies, blazingly fast (USB 2.0 vs traditional floppies anyone?) and all modern BIOSes can boot from one, either through a floppy emulation (el-torito-like) or even as a normal block device for very recent BIOSes.

Yes, they are still relatively expensive compared to a floppy disk, but they are getting cheaper fast. I just bought a new 128MB key for $25. It's not that bad considering you can carry it around on a keyring. Mine boots DOS and has all kind of recovery programs, such as partition magic, NTFS-Dos, various drivers, etc. You can also write to them without problem. OS support is good too. Linux 2.4 can read USB block devices, so can Win98 and up. You just plug it in your front USB port and you're set. And for those without front USB, a lot of keys come with a 3 feet USB extention (such as the Apacer ones) that you can use, allowing you not to mess around the back of the computer.

So yes, floppies are dead, but there are replacements already available that are incredibly superior.

Some do.

[RustyTaco]

Well, sort-of. Compaq is now providing Linux binary-magic-wrapped-in-a-shell script BIOS updates for some of their servers. I upgraded a Proliant ML530(G1) and it's RAID controler from within Debian/sid rather painlessly. It's not cat new.bios.bin > /dev/mtd0, but it's probably safer that way.

- RustyTaco

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