My laptop is "legacy" free, but I have a USB floppy disk drive. I need to boot from that in order to flash my BIOS, so that I can boot from USB devices. Ubuntu and Windows can both see it, but the BIOS can't boot from it. I'd like to add an entry to GRUB to boot from it and hopefully I can flash it that way. When doing fdisk -l and blkid I get the following information:

I can mount it and read from it within Ubuntu, but I'm not sure what to put in menu.lst to boot from it. This is my basic layout:

This gave me a Error 11: Unrecognized device string error. I replaced /media/disk with (sd1,0) and (sd0,0) but got the error message Error 23: Error while parsing number.

I really need this to work in case something screws up, any ideas?

Ain't going to work - grub queries the BIOS for valid devices.
Are you unable to boot from CD and flash it that way ???.

The laptop is "legacy free" which means no CD-rom and no floppy drive. And the manufacturer doesn't have a utility for flashing it within Windows.

Also, it does probe it while grub is loading. It just doesn't have an option to boot from it since I don't know what to add in menu.lst.

I wondered what you meant by thatHandy ...

If you see the the floppy being probed, try "root (fd0)". You can even do this at the grub prompt/menu. Hit <c> to get into command mode, and enter the root line then "boot".

You could create an image of the boot floppy and used memdisk to boot that from grub.


Way this works is download memdisk you don't need anything else its basically a kind of kernel.

put memdisk into /boot
make an image of the boot disk and put it in /boot lets say its called aflash.img

ad an entry to grub into menu.lst

title Flash_floppy
kernel (hd0,0)/boot/memdisk
initrd (hd0,0)/boot/aflash.img


reboot and you should have the option to boot to the floppy disk.

Memdisk will emulate a floppy on the system. Very helpful in these situations.

http://syslinux.zytor.com/memdisk.php