how do i make a bootable floppy (for bios flash)

norah_cobain · 06-29-2006, 02:57 PM

my motherboard bios site says:"Prepare one piece of clean bootable floppy disk with only booting program installed." im then supposed to copy the bios flash files onto the floppy.

i can do this with vmware/xp but i just dont want to!
how can i do this in linux?

im using ubuntu dapper

nadroj · 06-29-2006, 03:44 PM

can you just 'cp' the files to the floppy and reboot with the disk in?

norah_cobain · 06-29-2006, 04:19 PM

it says i need to make the floppy bootable first

Emerson · 06-29-2006, 04:40 PM

If they say make it bootable then they mean DOS boot floppy. BIOS upgrade file is probably accompanied by a DOS executable - a Linux bootable floppy would be useless.

nadroj · 06-29-2006, 04:40 PM

can you try without doing that? usually a floppy just needs software on it and it will be booted.. give it a shot

norah_cobain · 06-29-2006, 06:51 PM

okey ill give it a try (thing is i didnt receive the motherboard yet, its coming tomorrow, im just trying to think ahead as someone told me id need a new bios right away), if no success ill have to go the xp way i guess *grr*

HappyTux · 06-29-2006, 07:57 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by norah_cobain

okey ill give it a try (thing is i didnt receive the motherboard yet, its coming tomorrow, im just trying to think ahead as someone told me id need a new bios right away), if no success ill have to go the xp way i guess *grr*

I have made an image of a dos bootfloppy just so I don't have to hunt around for one when the inevitable floppy failure occurs. You can get it here if you want once downloaded use dd if=dosboot.img of=/dev/fd0 which will write it too the floppy all you should have to do is copy the bios.bin and flash.exe files to it and boot. Sometimes you only need the bios.bin file on the floppy if your motherboard supports flashing the bios itself as an option when booting/in the bios screen, a lot of the newer boards do this.