Anyway to flash a BIOS from a CD if it's a floppy BIOS?

[Gilbo]

I'd like to flash the BIOSes in a couple motherboards. All the systems lack floppy drves. There's a Winflash utility for flashing systems without floppies, but it only works in Windows. These systems are all Linux boxes.

Is it possible to shoehorn these BIOS updaters onto CDs?

If not, does anyone know if these BIOS updaters can be run from USB floppy disk drives?

Lastly, I've been doing some googling but I can't seem to figure out how to create an MS-DOS bootable floppy from Linux. Anyone know how? I'm probably just being an idiot...

 

[Gilbo]

Wow, my first half hour of googling was way off. I came up with some better searches and now have some promising leads. For future reference:

Gentoo Wiki Entry on creating bootable DOS floppies and CD-ROMs
Random other guide that looks useful.
Think Wiki Guide. (Wiki on Thinkpad-related Linux stuff. Quite handy for me and my T42 over the years.)

 

[Gilbo]

Slightly off-topic. I had a brief question for DFI tech support. They e-mailed me back in 13 minutes. Colour me impressed!

Back on-topic. The Gentoo Wiki guide is very well written and informative. The pick of the bunch I'd say. I have to recompile kernel though because I didn't include support for Loopback devices. I think most distros' default kernels ship with that support though so it should be pretty easy for most Linux users.

 

[CityK]

How about this

 

[sechs]

I flash my computer by booting to FreeDOS off of the UBCD and reading the flash files off of a FAT format partition that I have. All you need to do is stick those flash files someplace where they can be read.

 

[Mercutio]

Some boards cough*Asus*cough absolutely will not accept a BIOS flash from a CD-ROM.

You might consider makign a BartPE CD/Thumb drive with the relevant Windows Flash utility on it.

 

[Stereodude]

You make a bootable CD that loads dos based CD-rom drivers and put the file for flashing on the CD side, or if you're high tech you use a bootable USBkey.

 

[CityK]

Lastly, I've been doing some googling but I can't seem to figure out how to create an MS-DOS bootable floppy from Linux. Anyone know how? ...
Gentoo Wiki Entry on creating bootable DOS floppies and CD-ROMs
Random other guide that looks useful.

I happened to spot something of interest today in openSUSE: /usr/share/dosbootdisk/floppy.gz

"Is that what I think it is?" I says to myself. Yep, it is.

I notice in Yast > System, that there is also a "Boot or restore floppy" selection which then gives you a choice of d/l'ing about 8 or 9 different floppy images (I believe .... no idea what their differences are though)