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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?

2 of 174 comments (clear)

  1. you don't by agristin · · Score: 5, Informative

    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

  2. Linux/OSS workaround by Taliesin · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.