DOS Boot Disk CDrom How To
 

You can skip this part. I want to be able to find this information in the future. It won't get lost here. A little background: PCs don't have floppies anymore. What are laptop users supposed to do for a bios upgrade? CDrom drives have taken over for floppies, and this is a good thing, but bad. Every bios update uses dos based utilities, so we need a way to make a dos boot CDrom. You can start here for the juicy stuff.

Download the bare bones basic, or BBB, open source dos floppy image here: FDOEM.144.gz .

make sure you are in the directory you want to work from. If you download everything to /home/sam/Desktop/, and you are in /home/sam/, these instruction won't work. You need to be in the same directory as the files you're using.

For real newbies, set the browser to download somewhere you can find the file. Use gunzip FDOEM.144.gz to open the file.

Download the bios update file, and the flash utility, from the motherboard manufacturers website, and unzip them with unzip <file.zip>.

Copy this shell script into a text editor, fill in the missing bios upgrade filename, and flash utility filename. Name the script something after it is saved, and chmod a+x <script_name>. Then: su
password:
./<script_name> should spit out the iso file.

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#!/bin/bash
# dos boot cd bios flash disk
# script. Must be run from
# The same directory as the files
# it uses. Use chmod a+x <script_name>
# to make this script executable.

mkdir /mnt/dos
modprobe loop
mount -o loop FDOEM.144 /mnt/dos -t msdos
cp ./<bios upgrade file> /mnt/dos/
cp ./<flash utlity> /mnt/dos/
rm /mnt/dos/autoexec.bat
rm /mnt/dos/config.sys
rm /mnt/dos/readme
umount /mnt/dos
mkisofs -o <dos-cd-image-name>.iso -b ./FDOEM.144 ./FDOEM.144 ...

-----------------------------copy------------------------------

... And burn <dos-cd-image-name>.iso to a cd, as an image, not as file. In k3b, you choose Burn CD Image
from the Tools Menu. Boot with the CD, use the dir command to check filenames after you're in dos. Flash the bios.

The rest is up to you, My Son, for I have given you a fine mind, courage, and adeptitude. You shall not fail. God is with you.

-Awesome

Thanks, pal. I just downloaded the new BIOS yesterday and knowing I have to fiddle (again! I never remember how I did it last time) was holding me back.

Good stuff. This is exactly what I do to upgrade my BIOS. You can burn the image from the CLI using:

cdrecord dev=/dev/cdrom -v dos-boot-image.iso

Changing /dev/cdrom to your appropriate device obviously.