taint.org: Justin Mason’s Weblog

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).

• Grab the FreeDOS “ripcord” boot floppy image from the FreeDOS RipCord Bootdisk page — the 2.88MB version: FDSTD.288.gz (that link’s a local mirror).

• Grab the BIOS updater app from your PC vendor’s site. In my case, I used ME051A10.EXE, a BIOS update from Dell.

• Run:

  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…

Tags: bios, bootable, booting, cd, cdrom, dell, dos, floppy, freedos, hardware, iso, msdos