HOWTO do a DOS-based BIOS upgrade without Windows

April 23, 2007 at 3:37 pm

Wow, I can’t believe I still have to do this in 2007 — Taiwan really needs to discover FreeDOS! Here’s how to run a DOS BIOS update on a PC without using Windows (in my case, it’s a Dell laptop).

  gunzip FDSTD.288.gz
  sudo mount -t msdos -o loop `pwd`/FDSTD.288 /tmp/bootiso
  • ensure there’s enough space, and copy the app into the disk image:
  df /tmp/bootiso
  sudo cp ME051A10.EXE /tmp/bootiso
  • Then make an ISO, using mkisofs’ “-b” option to ensure it’s bootable:
  mkdir /tmp/floppycopy
  cp -Rp /tmp/bootiso/* /tmp/floppycopy
  cp -p FDSTD.288 /tmp/floppycopy
  mkisofs -pad -b FDSTD.288 -R -o /tmp/cd.iso /tmp/floppycopy
  • And burn it:
  sudo umount /tmp/bootiso
  sudo cdrecord dev=0,0,0 -pad -v -eject /tmp/cd.iso
  • Now, take the burned CDROM, and boot it.

Answer “N” to all questions when booting, otherwise you’re likely to see an error like “Cannot operate in Protected environment” when you run the BIOS update.

Thanks to the Motherboard Flash Boot CD from Linux Mini HOWTO; very helpful. I hope the next time I have to do this, they just issue a bootable ISO image instead…

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Making a Bootable CD from a Floppy Image

June 16, 2004 at 7:19 pm

Tech: Troubleshooters: Making a bootable CD from a bootable floppy image.
Making a note of this for future reference — it should be handy next time I need to do a BIOS or firmware upgrade on my Thinkpad.

I ran into the need for this recently when trying to upgrade the BIOS on my Thinkpad running Linux, so hibernation would work. IBM don’t provide BIOS upgrade tools for Linux, so you have to keep a Windows partition around. (Yes, I pay the Windows Tax — I’ve been bitten by proprietary firmware upgrades requiring it in the past, as in this case.)

Amazingly, however, even after paying the Tax, the ‘non-diskette’ BIOS upgrade (ie. the standalone Windows app) doesn’t work from Windows XP! Instead, you get a hard hang when it tries to bring the machine down from XP to a single-app mode to perform the upgrade. Running from DOS similarly fails, because the BIOS upgrade app is a WIN32 application. Clever.

Eventually, I wound up reformatting my Windows partition, installing Windows 98 (!), and running the BIOS upgrade app from that worked fine. But next time around, I should be able to save myself a few hours of MCSE imitation by using this floppy-to-CD trick… here’s hoping. ;) PCs Are Hard.

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Windows Partition Pain

March 20, 2004 at 3:26 am

Computer: Argh. When I bought my laptop, I had no option but to buy it with Windows XP — IBM doesn’t seem to sell them any other way. (you can pay extra to buy it that way from EmperorLinux, but really, the main reason I wouldn’t want it is to save money, I’m afraid.)

Anyway, so I kept the XP partition safe, and jumped through various hoops to keep it in one piece; after all, it had cost me money to pay for that Windows license, and you never know when I might need it to upgrade some firmware or whatever.

Well, after trying (twice) to upgrade some firmware — the BIOS, namely, to get APM hibernation working — and having XP crash on me both times, I left it for a bit.

That was a couple of weeks ago. I just tried to check some files on the /windows partition — and something has scribbled all over the FAT32 sectors. Rien de Windows plus. :(

(Prime suspect right now is the Phoenix BIOS ’suspend-to-disk’ tool — I just looks flakey, and I know it goes in and tweaks with some kind of undocumented BIOS wierdness. I bet anything it’s told the BIOS that the first FAT32 partition was a suspend partition, and one of the failed susp-to-disk attempts scribbled all over it.)

I suppose I’ll probably reinstall at some stage… if only to get this bloody BIOS upgraded and suspend-to-disk working!

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