[BALUG-Talk] Options for booting windows to update BIOS?

[Barry King]

Hello,

The way I solved this problem in the past was to use a combination of
memdisk, grub, and mtools.  Basically I'd get a copy of the freedos
boot floppy image, throw it in /boot, use mcopy (from mtools) to copy
the bios installer & rom to it, and throw it in grub.  After that I'd
create and/or modify an autoexec.bat to load the rom installer w/
whatever options it needed.

I'd make various versions of these and push them out to computers w/
cfengine so that I could keep developer workstations current.

Looks like the gentoo wiki has the grub piece here:
http://en.gentoo-wiki.com/wiki/FreeDOS_Flash_Drive

Info on mtools is here:
http://mtools.linux.lu/mtools.html

HTH,

Barry King
barryking93 at gmail.com



On Wed, May 6, 2009 at 8:21 PM, goobears <acohen36 at linuxwaves.com> wrote:
> --- mbh.lists at gmail.com wrote:
>> I have some Intel and Supermicro motherboards which need upgraded
>> BIOSes, and the BIOS update utility for at least one motherboard is
>> Windows-only....
>>
>> Anyhow, what's the current state of affairs when it comes to upgrading
>> BIOSes on systems which don't have Windows?  Something like a LiveCD
>> of XP would be great.  Lots of options turn up in Google, but it's not
>> clear which way to go.
>
> There is this which came out today:
> http://www.h-online.com/open/Universal-BIOS-Flash-programmer-for-Linux-BSD-and-more--/news/113221
> Though from the motherboard list at http://www.coreboot.org/Flashrom it looks like your *specific* motherboard manufacturers are not *yet* listed.
> OTOH, this FlashROM BIOS upgrade progam *might* indeed end up working fine on your systems.
> Please feel free to let the CoreBoot developers and we others know how this works for you.
>
> --
> usr's UniverSal RecUrSive postulate heRe:
> "There exists at least one subatomic particle in our Universe which CONTAINS at least one non-self subatomic particle."
>
>
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