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Why Do We Have to Use a Floppy to Flash BIOS?

Posted by Cliff on from the there's-better-removable-media-out-there dept.

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?

5 of 174 comments (clear)

  1. Because by WebHostingGuy · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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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  2. The answer is: Mu by moonbender · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

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  3. Why are we still using BIOS's by QuantumRiff · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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...

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    1. Re:Why are we still using BIOS's by Kalzus · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Because we are still using (on x86) a CPU that, when it powers up, emulates a CPU that was designed 20 years ago. So your peripherals have to have options ROMs that expect an operating environment that is similar to 20 years ago.

      If someone can get every BIOS maker, motherboard maker, video card maker, SCSI card maker and network card maker to all simultaneously (a) switch to a different pre-boot environment, or (b) include code for both the existing AT-style pre-boot as well as a hypothetical newer environment; escaping the AT-style POST environment won't happen.

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  4. ...But you don't need BIOS in Linux! by Baloo+Ursidae · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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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