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

That razor thing

[77Punker]

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.

Wrong Question

[Kris_J]

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.

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

[Chris Snook]

You're joking, right? Basic Input Output System. No, you don't need it doing anything terribly intelligent once it's booted, but you definitely need it to NOT be doing anything incredibly stupid. I've seen plenty of repeatable post-boot panics, device resets, data corruption, machine check exceptions, etc., that were fixed by BIOS updates. Veteran laptop users will also tell you about the huge impact the BIOS version makes on how many charge cycles your battery will go before you have to throw it out and get a new one.

Also remember that a BIOS update accomplishes a firmware update for any onboard devices (except for some rare, really weird ones). The one piece of firmware that I've seen makes even more of a difference than the BIOS proper is the firmware on a RAID card, and some boards have those built in too. (And then some have fakeraid, but that's another rant.) There are even some network cards with significant firmware bugs.

I personally will cheer when BIOS is dispensed with, so long as it doesn't get replaced with something even more hideous, like ELILO on Itanium systems. Until then, I will update it any time I have a problem I can't fix in software, or any time I can on a laptop.