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Why Do We Have to Use a Floppy to Flash BIOS?
Koskun asks: "With all the time and technology that has come and gone with computers why must we still use a floppy disk to flash the BIOS anymore? Yes, some manufacturers are enabling BIOS flash from within Windows, but there are still a lot of motherboards out there that require you to find a floppy to flash the BIOS. It took me two floppy drives and four floppy disks just to find one of each that worked." Are there reasons why BIOS manufacturers haven't moved BIOS flashing to modern media like USB flash drives, or bootable CD-ROMs?
The simplest explanation tends to be the best. They are lazy programmers who know they won't sell many extra motherboards if they do include the extra ability.
They haven't been forced to do so by market forces. It's the philosophy if it's not broke don't fix it. In this case they haven't been forced to do anything different by the end use customers. (And in this case you generally are the end user; HP, Dell, IBM, etc. are the next in line from the motherboard manuafacturers).
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I use giga-byte boards, which allow me to flash from windows with @Bios or something along those lines
(Score:0, Interesting)
I flashed my IBM NetVista at work a while back with a bootable CD. At least some companies provide a CD-based installer.
To keep the floppy industry alive.
Stop complaining, and start backing stuff up on floppies too!
Pretty Pictures!
Make a boot floppy image and burn it to cd.
Boot from cd update BIOS. I've done this about 10 times for different motherboards.
I've even done it just from linux using dos bootdisks from the internet (I don't have dos anymore):
1) download awdflash and bios for mobo
2) download bootdisk image from bootdisk.com
3) loop mount disk image
4) delete some files to make room, pare down the autoexec.bat, put awdflash and bios on mounted disk image
5) umount disk image and burn as a bootable cd (you can even use something like K3b or xcdroast to do this from a gui)
6) boot from cd, and then flash bios.
It gets niftier...
Say you have to do this in a cluster. Keep that dos boot disk image and automate it some (awdflash has some command line switches, batch file etc).
Then put that image on your PXE server as a bootable option. Change your DHCP server and PXE boot, then you can remotely upgrade bios on 100s or thousands of identical machines. Be careful with this part or you can make some thousand dollar paper weights.
If you are running windows, many modern mobo manufacturers have bios updaters that run in windows.
-A
My ASUS motherboard can also flash itself from a bootable CD. In fact it's the only way to revert to the original BIOS in case your flash doesn't go so well and you end up with a blank screen after rebooting.
sorry
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Last time I was faced with this, I found it wasn't to hard to pull of touching neither Microsoft software not a floppy disk. First this I did was to download the freely available and open source FreeDOS. I simply downloaded a pre-built bootable floppy image, though you could make your own from scratch. I mounted that floppy image in Linux using the loopback device, added the necessary flash tool and BIOS binary, and unmounted. Using my custom image, I burned a bootable CD (bootable CDs use basically the same format as bootable floppies). I popped that CD in, and the machine booted right up as if I had a put in a floppy. Ran the tool as instructed, and I had a newly flashed BIOS. A little work, maybe, but worth it.
If the BIOS and flasher can fit on a floppy, it runs in DOS. This means that I can use FreeDOS and actually flash the BIOS at all.
still the most universal form of storage. Everything still supports it.
I don't see why it would be a big deal to have multiple forms of updates. I can imagine being able to update from a USB flash drive, for example, would be great for an enterprise.
"All I want is a warm bed and a kind word and unlimited power." - Ashleigh Brilliant
If you have a floppy image there is no reason you can't make a bootable CD from it. Depending on the BIOS flash program (i.e. the image is embedded in an exe or com file) you may have to make the floppy first.
I have had to make bootable CD's in the case there wasn't a drive available on a computer to be flashed. Also, it's useful if you have to flash several computers.
There is also the chicken/egg dilemna in the case (perhaps rare) of flashing to support bootable CD's.
/^([Ss]ame [Bb]at (time, |channel.)){2}$/
I'll just let the rest of Slashdot rant about how much floppy drives suck, and how the disks only hold data reliably for maybe 20 minutes if you're lucky and how damn slow they are and how floppy drives are just a waste of a drive slot.
because then viruses would erase your CMOS
I had to flash my bios and didn't have any floppy disks. So here I am at the store at 2am buying a package of ten floppy disks (of which I will use only 1) for $10 - more expensive then cds I could have burned the image onto.
Anyway, I got home only to realize the computer didn't even have a floppy drive. Throw me a freakin' bone here.
or else!
The question is inane. As others already have pointed out, you don't have to use a floppy to flash your BIOS, and you never had to. Yes, some boards will only let you flash from within something like DOS, but how you get to a DOS environment never mattered at all. Boot from anything, a CD, a memory stick, network, or a hard disk, it doesn't matter. Make it writable if you want to back up the current image.
To save myself from burning a CD every time an update was released, I created a tiny (100 meg) FAT16 partition and just one DOS boot CD. I couldn't access the NTFS drives from DOS, but the FAT16 partition containing the BIOS images was no problem. I stopped having a floppy disk drive attached to my computer years ago.
And of course, these days I just flash from within Windows. The (perceived) added danger of things going wrong makes it all more exciting!
Perhabs a better question would have been - are there ways to flash from within Linux these days? Last I looked (a long time ago), I couldn't find anything reliable.
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
Primarily because that's how it's always been done.
Secondarily because even if you munge the flash there is usually a very tiny portion of the BIOS that is difficult to corrupt which holds the code to boot a floppy and execute simple code fromt the floppy - meaning you can screw up your bios and still fix it with a floppy.
It takes a lot of bios code to start a motherboard, but very little to start a floppy drive to the point where a flash can happen.
There's no reason why this couldn't be done on a bootable flash drive, cdrom, or other device as long as you don't mess up the bios during the flash.
-Adam
I've always wondered why the BIOS can't simply skip over a floppy in the boot process when it isn't bootable.
I'm sure everyone here has left a floppy in the drive and had it tell you to remove it and then hit any key to continue. Why can't it just realize that there isn't anything bootable there and go on to the next boot device? It will skip over non-bootable CDs and DVDs fine, but for some reason, the BIOS can't do that with floppies.
Does anyone have a clue as to why this is?
so you'd have to buy a new one. This once happened to me. My bios had this thing against my (at that time) newly bought GeForce 440MX so I had no other choice but to flash it. So I downloaded the bios flash put it on a floppy and gues what, the floppy just crashed on me in the middle of the flashing... After that you can guess what happened. Anyway my current PC doesn't even have a floppy so unless I find some painless way of flashing my bios I'm not doing it.
./R My blog
You always can take floppy image and burn it to CD and make it bootable. But I understand what you mean - as I've seen some manufacturers don't just provide floppy images. They provide some dumb program extracting data directly to floppy. I once owned old IBM ThinkPad which BIOS could be only controlled from Windows application or from crude dos prompt (PS2.EXE). And provided files could only extract directly to floppy. So I had to extract it on other machine, make image and burn it on CD :\ ... It was old laptop I know. But still kind of silly as one zip with image and rawrite.exe program in batch would do the trick also...
I guess it is because manufacturers are lazy and don't give a shit? After all flashing your mobo is stuff for geeks or tech shops...
Why are we still using a BIOS on the motherboard patterned after the designs of 20 years ago. None of my computers come with serial, parrellel, or PS2 ports, and no more ISA.. so why are we still using old hacked together BIOS? Sun and Mac have been off of standard BIOS's for years...
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
Why are you still using BIOS?
Why are you still using floppies?
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
Where the hell do you buy floppy drives for 50? Floppys are about $8 for a generic to $12 if you go for a name brand like Teac.
"All I want is a warm bed and a kind word and unlimited power." - Ashleigh Brilliant
Libertarian socialists believe in the abolition of privately held means of production and abolition of the state as unnecessary and harmful institutions.
I'm curious how your political "philosophy" proposes to do away with both government and private property? Or are you not against private property per se, just private property protected by the state?
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
But if you're running Linux, why even bother updating software that will only ever be used from the time the power turns on to the time Grub or Lilo hand off to the kernel? Seems like a big risk of blowing that code and making a big, unbootable doorstop for absolutely zero payoff.
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MSI board have 2 BIOS. You can flash one from Windows. The change take effect on the next reboot of course.
You can still do it trough a floppy, and the good thing is that with 2 BIOS, if the update fail, MSI boards recover by themselves.
But I did it in Windows a couple of time. Now Unbuntu is installed on that machine, I guess i'll do it with a floppy (MSI is great, but they support is a little hmmm foreign)
The spec that describes floppies and how bios's read them to boot says that the bios will load the first sector (512 bytes, IIRC) into memory and execute it. A simple solution for those old machines that ran only on floppy disks. However, because of this, when you format a floppy, the format utility puts a minimal 'boot' program in there that displays the message that you need to put a system disk in the drive and restart the computer. If they didn't do that, the bios would load whatever was in that sector and attempt to execute it.
For reference, a system disk has just enough room in that 512 bytes to get the system files loading into memory and executing.
Really though, it wouldn't be difficult to create a new standard whereby that minimal boot loader can query the bios to see if it is smart enough to continue the boot process, and if so go back to that. Older bioses would not respond correctly, and the default message could be displayed.
More Caffeine. NOW
make a bootable cd with dos. stick your bios image and flash program on a fat partition. boot cd and flash.
The real question is "Why does Windows XP SP2 setup still only accept SCSI and RAID drivers from a standard old floppy drive?". I know you can slipstream drivers into an install CD, because that's what I had to do the last time I built up a PC without a floppy, but the setup routine really should at least allow drivers to be installed from a USB floppy drive by now.
So I had to flash using the floppy. I never bought a floppy drive because I didn't use the floppy in my then-current machine, so why would I use a floppy in a new machine. So I went to the old machine and tried to get the floppy out. But the screwhead is stripped! I can't get it out. It takes forever (in reality, about 25 minutes). But I finally get it out and am able to flash the BIOS.
So flashing from floppy seems annoying as hell. But if the BIOS problem prevents you from running Windows, it makes sense.
A $500,000 65 GHz network analyser/BERT tester/whatever high-end RF equipment would allow you to either 1) save data to a floppy or 2) print to a (Centronix-connected) printer or 3) yeah, get data over GPIB, if you write a program/.vi to do that.
So, I guess, the floppies are here to stay -- I know that my company-issued laptop had one BECAUSE I had to transfer data to/from those beasts.
Paul B.
When I went to update the BIOS in my Toshiba Satellite, which doesn't even come with a floppy drive, I discovered that since sometime in 2002, Toshiba started supplying bootable .iso images with BIOS updates. So, a quick CD-RW burn later (with the Satellite's DVD/CD-RW drive), I was booting off the CD, and updating BIOS and the CPU's microcode...
I've yet to try it with my desktop system, but that's a 1999-vintage Tyan.
(OT: for the love of christ, WTF can't logged-in users post through tor?!)
"The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule." --H.L. Mencken
You can always take a floppy disk with the BIOS info on it and make it into an image to make a bootable CD with it. I work on laptops for a living and that is what I have todo with a lot of the laptops nowadays because of the lack of floppy drives. Plus once the bootable CD is made it takes next to no time to update the BIOS's as the system doesn't have to read the information from the floppy drive every time.
Dell laptops allow you to flash the bios from GRUB (linux bootloader). Not sure how well it works.
By summer it was all gone...now shesmovedon. --
Coincidentally, I just fetched a bootable CDROM for updating a BIOS for an IBM x-series machine. So not everyone is still in floppy land.
Cameron Simpson, DoD#743 cs@cskk.id.au http://www.cskk.ezoshosting.com/cs/
My Plextor DVD drive can only be flashed from Windows or MacOS. I only /wish/ I could flash it from a boot floppy.
-Peter
Many machines allow you to flash with a bootable CD. My Toshiba laptops (3 years old) and ASUS motherboard (1 year old) do. It's usually just a matter of using the bootable floppy image to create the bootable CD. Check with your manufacturer - if it can boot a CD, it will probably work. Usually they just consider the creation of a bootable CD to be too hard for their customers.
Can You Say Linux? I Knew That You Could.
improving bios could even lead us to booting from them, and there will be no problems booting diferent OS in the same PC! e.g: like the NTFS propietary code and the MBR on linux
The poster hasn't though this through properly ! Under no circumstances should the manufacturer require something different UNLESS - and I put a huge amount of enphasis on that - unless they are willing to support all operating systems !!!
... one of the other "types".
I recently wanted to upgrade a BIOS where the manufacturer has a nice little windows program, but guess what? I WASN'T RUNNING WINDOWS !! Now I'm absolutely stuffed to upgrade the BIOS unless I go through a rigmarol of either legally purchasing a once off use windows, or finding
What manufacturers need to do is put support in the actual BIOS - i.e. allow it to check a USB drive / CD etc and then upgrade itself.
Madness people.
I had noticed that the BIOS on the controlller card was a bit old and decided to go about updating it. But on my system, I had removed the floppy drive to put in more hard drives. (It's a Dell PowerEdge 400SC, two extra hard drives can fit in the spot for the floppy drive using the floppy drive rails.) Knowing that my system can boot of a USB drive, I went and tried to "install" one of the bootdisk utilities on it. They all pitched a bitch because I wasn't trying to install it on a floppy drive. The phrase, "No Shit, Sherlock!" came to my mind at that point. Next I used FreeDOS, and this time I reached success. Gotta love Free Software/Open Source, it just fucking works. With FreeDOS installed, and the BIOS utility loaded on, reboot the system. System BIOS sees it and has it as a boot option in the One Time Boot Menu. Loaded into DOS, ran the Promise BIOS update utility, stopped cold in my tracks, it complained that it was being loaded from a floppy drive! Apparently, a 128MB USB stick is not good enough to flash a fucking SATA controller card. All told I spent an hour trying to get it installed.
Wanting to update your BIOS: One slap against the forehead
Being told that you can't make a bootdisk on a USB stick by a Win32 program: One head slam on the keyboard
Having a cocka-mamee program tell you you CAN'T update because you're not using a Floppy: Fuckin' Priceless
You must supply the SCSI drivers on a *floppy* during windows XP setup.
"Why do I read Slashdot whilst I obviously know shit about computers?".
This guy obviously doesn't know anything about what he's doing. Just to sum up some of the other posts'
- You can use any bootable device, including CD's and network; if it boots, if can flash.
- Most modern MLB's can be flashed from within Windows.
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Flashing a BIOS can be dangerous if it fails, DOS can be considered more stable than Windows, I think.
I just add a floppy image to my UBCD. It takes a minute, but it's not hard. Google for Ultimate Boot CD.
Cheap storage VM.
flash bios? can't you just pop out the lithium battery and stick a peice of metal on the two conductors to flash the bios?, or are we talking about somthing way more complex and over my head here?
Am no fek Buddhist, but this is enlightenment.
Personally, I'd like to see some kind of hardware lock on BIOSes, so they couldn't be written to without the lock turned off.
This goes for routers and other equipment too.
How long before some virus-writer figures out how to flash your PCs bios behind your back.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
My Chaintech VNF4/Ultra has a BIOS updater within the BIOS itself that can load images from a CD. So, burn the new image to a CD, reboot the PC, stick the CD in, go into the BIOS updater during POST, and tell it to use the file on the CD.
Flashing the BIOS is updating the code on there, all you've described is clearing CMOS. And there are jumpers on the motherboard to do that without taking out the battery too.
All of our recent PowerEdge servers can update all of their BIOS, RAID firmware, etc. from within Linux.
FSVO Linux, see Red Hat Enterprise.
You DON'T have to flash from a floppy. You have to flash from DOS. Don't confuse the two. You can put the flash program on any device you can cleanly boot into DOS. This includes systems with SDCard boot capability, CDROM boot capability, or even USB hard disk boot capability.
This has nothing to do with the floppy and I can't believe slashdotters even responded to this as if it did. The medium means nothing, you simply need to freshly boot the system into DOS.
Why do they require DOS? Lets just say that Windows is "multitasking" and at any point your virus scanner, or some other thing running in the god aweful system tray, may launch and interrupt the flash process in a way that makes your board useless.
I'm really sick of people whining about this sort of crap. Get over it. You are lucky to own technology that you can't create yourself, much less understand. Be happy and stop whining about your inability to create a boot disk on anything but a floppy...and it is YOUR inability and YOUR purchase choice of hardware that may not boot the mediums you want to flash from.
I keep a small USB stick around for misc. projects like this. Any modern mobo will boot from a USB device.
1) bootdisk.com - get a DOS floppy image
2) dd if=image.img of=/dev/sda1
3) mount and place flash program and BIOS image on memory stick
4) Reboot machine (changing boot order if necessary)
What else are you going to do with that old 16MB thumb drive.
This means that the motherboard's designer has ultimate control over the system, even after you have loaded your operating system.
Is this part of "trusted" computing?
Seriously... I had only one experience flashing a BIOS; my AMD K6-300 with a PC Chips motherboard. The floopy formatted well, and the files extracted happily, I though all was well until it crapped out, due to some bad sectors on the floppy, during the update. After kicking around the idea of replacing my board completely, I found BadFlash.com. You can find tons of makes/models of boards and purchase replacement ROM chips. Very with the 20 something bucks back in the day.
Coding my way to the next BSOD!