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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.
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
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.
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
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?
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.
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. --
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.
OtakuBooty.com: Smart, funny, sexy nerds.
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.
There's no failure quite as dissatisfying as a complete and total solution to the wrong problem.