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?

Comments

not all

[TheDarkRogue]

I use giga-byte boards, which allow me to flash from windows with @Bios or something along those lines

Re:not all

[Captain Splendid]

Eh, it's about as hair-raising as doing anything in Windows: Kinda, but not really.

Re:not all

[fimbulvetr]

You can try to go to http://www.badflash.com/.
They might have something for you.
If you feel like something really cool, you can put a good bios in the mobo (one you got from badflash or a similiar mobo), boot up, pull the good bios, put the bad one back in and reflash.
Sounds crazy-I know-but it's worked every time for me.

Re:not all

[facelessnumber]

I can back you up on that - it sounds completely nuts but it works.

Couple of years ago I installed some 40 or so computers at a couple of schools in another state a few hundred miles away. Trucked them there in a Uhaul. Started unpacking them, booting them up, and a few failed. No problem, I had extra motherboards and other parts for just this reason... The only problem is, as I kept going I discovered that just under half of them turned out to have a dead BIOS and would not come up at all.

Now, I don't know why that was. I'd had every one of them powered on before I left, because I'd imaged the drives. They all worked fine. I have some half-baked theories, but I still don't know what the hell happened. But here I was getting to the end of the day, I had two labs to get running in two days, and only enough machines for one. God knows how I'd ever get those 18 or so dead motherboards replaced under warranty, but nevermind that, I just didn't want to have to make that trip again, and we absolutely had to have those labs installed now.

So I finished the first lab and took every one of those dead machines up to my hotel room. Myself and another guy popped out all of the BIOS chips. We each took a working machine, booted up, dumped a copy of the flash onto a floppy and then ripped out the BIOS chips while the machines were running. Then we'd put a bad chip in, flash it, pull it out, put it back into a motherboard. I shit you not, my geek bretheren, this actually worked.

While we were at it, we also re-imaged all of the drives, having found out we had additional software to install. It was a long night.

When we installed the second lab, everything worked fine except for one problem. The DHCP server handed out the same IP address to every machine. It took us a a little while to notice this because any machine we tried to use would work great until another one tried to do something on the network. Turns out, all of the on-board NICs ended up with the same MAC address.

We were able to fix that because the BIOS allowed us to change the MAC's. These boards were Biostar M7NCD Pro. Incidentally, this was also the day that the MS Blaster worm hit and crippled teh intarweb. Most of the trip back was spent on the phone.

Some use CD

[Anonymous Coward]

I flashed my IBM NetVista at work a while back with a bootable CD. At least some companies provide a CD-based installer.

you don't

[agristin]

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

Re:you don't

[BRTB]

Or (if you can read USB key after a DOS boot, most likely you can boot from it):

1. Format USB key with FAT16/FAT32
2. Copy DOS system files to USB key
3. Put bios update files on USBkey
4. Boot from USB key
5. Update bios

Bonus points if you use SYSLINUX to choose between multiple DOS floppy images - some having network support for multiple NICs, a MemTest image, and a copy of ZipSlack.

Re:you don't

[Miffe]

Or even better

Use memdisk from syslinux to boot the floppy image directly from grub or so.

Linux/OSS workaround

[Taliesin]

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.

Bootable CD

[atomic-penguin]

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.

Re:A floppy is......

[Planesdragon]

Everything still supports it.

Except for the mac.

And the PC built by someone trying to save $50 on a floppy drive they'd only use to flash their BIOS.

Re:That razor thing

[Anonymous Coward]

That razor thing

Re:A $50 floppy????

[OneDeeTenTee]

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.

That's what the Apple Store charges if you want one in your PowerMac.

Re:The answer is: Mu

[Nasarius]

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.

Not exactly flashing from within Linux, but check out biosdisk. Gentoo has the package.

Dell

[jb.hl.com]

Dell laptops allow you to flash the bios from GRUB (linux bootloader). Not sure how well it works.

Re:...But you don't need BIOS in Linux!

[mjg59]

Because in the ACPI world, information stored in the BIOS is used for a wide variety of tasks during kernel runtime. How do you think the kernel learns how your interrupts are wired? How does it know what power saving modes your motherboard and processors support? For that matter, how does it know how many processors you have in the first place? All of this information is stored in tables in the BIOS, and a lot of the time vendors get it wrong in earlier BIOS revisions.

Re:...But you don't need BIOS in Linux!

[Anonymous Coward]

Sometimes a BIOS flash will correct issues that BIOS may cause under Linux. A good example of this is BIOS update A29 which "Updates Intel video BIOS & add 'UMA size' setup option to fix the graphics issue with Linux on Inspiron 1100."

Next time on "Ask Slashdot"..

[mwvdlee]

"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.

Re:Why are we still using BIOS's

[Detritus]

Once the bootloader kicks in, however, the BIOS is irrelevant.

Wrong. Read Intel's documentation on System Management Mode, especially popular on laptops. You may think that your operating system has complete control over the hardware, but it doesn't. The motherboard can force the CPU to enter SMM and execute code from the BIOS. This means that the motherboard's designer has ultimate control over the system, even after you have loaded your operating system.