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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)
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
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 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 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!
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.
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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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?
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.
Stop the world; I need to get off.
someone trying to save $50 on a floppy drive
Have they started making floppy drives out of babies?
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>> Everything still supports it.
> Except for the mac.
And my PC.
When I bought a Firewire board for my PC, it needed one of those small power connections from the PSU, like the floppy drive uses. Since they were all (both) already in use, I had to choose between Firewire board and floppy drive.
The floppy drive is now in my "obsolete computer bits" pile, along with my zip drive and 4x CDROM.
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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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Apple still sells floppy drives for current model computers. Are there any PC motherboards out there that don't have a connector for a floppy? Mainstream, not specialized form factor boards.?
Four months is not that long. All the new stuff I have looked at coming in the door still has the option of updating the BIOS by floppy. We are talking mostly Dells here. Even checked the servers in the closet. They do as well.
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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
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.
If you do not live in the city, rural computer solutions are pricey. My local computer shoppe has 1.6 ghz laptops with no wireless selling for 2000 dollars. We do not even have a Walmart within 100 miles. I suppose we are lucky in every aspect but convience but it is an artificial economy here in Eureka, Ca. The local governing bodies oppose monopolies and large corporations in some part but there are cities that are breaking the trend and are in talks with Walmart.
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Dell laptops allow you to flash the bios from GRUB (linux bootloader). Not sure how well it works.
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If you do not live in the city, rural computer solutions are pricey. My local computer shoppe has 1.6 ghz laptops with no wireless selling for 2000 dollars.
If only there was some sort of digital global computer network with "sites" where you could order a computer (from one of thousands of competing suppliers) and have it mailed to your house.
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"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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