BIOS upgrade

[Fixxer_Linux]

Among other things that comes in a decision when buying a new motherboard, should be taken care how easy it is to upgrade the BIOS of the motherboard under linux.

Asus and Gigabyte have a flashing utility integrated directly in the BIOS, allowing to flash with a USB drive directly from the BIOS. Rather cool when using linux.

Abit and MSI doesn't seems to be so friendly when it comes to BIOS upgrades for non-windows users, but what are the options to flash the bios when the computer doesn't have a floppy drive nor windows ?
There is the FreeDOS option (I think it's called "FreeDOS" ?), but is it safe enough to flash a mobo on which you don't have a backup BIOS in case of emergency (Abit doesn't seems to integrate a second BIOS on mobos, don't know for MSI) ? Especially when BIOS programs are engineered to work with a floppy drive and not an USB Flash drive.

Has someone a walktrough for that or am I condemned to choose between Asus or Gigabyte just because of the BIOS ??? (Which are good brands, that's not the point, just I'd like perhaps more choice after all)

[deanjo]

Among other things that comes in a decision when buying a new motherboard, should be taken care how easy it is to upgrade the BIOS of the motherboard under linux.

Asus and Gigabyte have a flashing utility integrated directly in the BIOS, allowing to flash with a USB drive directly from the BIOS. Rather cool when using linux.

Abit and MSI doesn't seems to be so friendly when it comes to BIOS upgrades for non-windows users, but what are the options to flash the bios when the computer doesn't have a floppy drive nor windows ?
There is the FreeDOS option (I think it's called "FreeDOS" ?), but is it safe enough to flash a mobo on which you don't have a backup BIOS in case of emergency (Abit doesn't seems to integrate a second BIOS on mobos, don't know for MSI) ? Especially when BIOS programs are engineered to work with a floppy drive and not an USB Flash drive.

Has someone a walktrough for that or am I condemned to choose between Asus or Gigabyte just because of the BIOS ??? (Which are good brands, that's not the point, just I'd like perhaps more choice after all)

Most times you are able to set a USB thumbdrive to be a bootable device which does work for flashing BIOS's. The other option is to make a bootable CD with the flash app and BIOS update included on it.

[Fixxer_Linux]

Thanks very much for your answer.

[Kano]

There are other cool ways to boot:

a) Create a disk boot image (simply change an already bootable one) and create an iso image from it:

mkisofs -b boot.img -o boot.iso boot.img

b) Try nero linux - just put the files to flash on a boot cd (does not always work)

c) use usb stick to boot boot.img with help of memdisk

d) Even cooler - maybe less usual: use pxelinux.0 -> memdisk + boot.img and boot via network. Maybe not the normal way, but when you have to update lots of pcs - i did that already *g*

[deanjo]

d) Even cooler - maybe less usual: use pxelinux.0 -> memdisk + boot.img and boot via network. Maybe not the normal way, but when you have to update lots of pcs - i did that already *g*

You just can't do stuff the simple way can you?

[energyman]

systemresucecd had freedos as a boot option. So I do this: convert swap to a ms dos/fat partition, copy flasher+bios image onto that partition, boot from systemresucecd, enter freedos, go to c: flash. That way I also flash dvd-burner and cdrw drives.

[rbmorse]

Clever. Txs.