I'm trying to upgrade the BIOS in a Dell Dimension 4300. I found the latest BIOS on the dell support site: version A06. The currently installed BIOS is A02.

I installed a 2.0 GHz Celeron -128kb L2, 400Mhz fsb. I looked it up and the mobo supports any 400 Mhz, socket 478 processor.

The current BIOS shows the cpu as 00 Mhz, 256k. I read somewhere that the BIOS doesn't have the ability to display "128 kb". The BIOS setup is functioning fine other than this and it ran PartedMagic (live CD).

But it won't boot the floppy with the BIOS upgrade. I've tried 9 different floppy drives that were pulled from working systems. The green LED on the floppy drives all lit up. I tried turning the IDE channels to OFF. I tried changing the boot order. I tried unplugging the IDE cables from the mobo. I tried hitting F12 to bring up the boot selection screen and then pressing "2." to boot to floppy. I tried multiple combinations of these.

It always says:

strike F1 to retry boot, F2 for setup utility

is this a bootable floppy ?

I downloaded the dell executable file onto a Windows machine. When you run the program with a formatted disk in drive A, it makes a bootable disk for you. I've done it before on the same machine with no issues.

I realize this isn't interesting Linux stuff, but does anybody have a guess on this?

Does the floppy boots on another computer?
What happens if you use another bootable floppy, not the one with the bios upgrade,
But a bootfloppy from http://www.bootdisk.com/

Thanks repo. Your questions helped me get back to a methodical approach (after taking a few days off)

I tried the floppy on another computer and it didn't boot. I tried a different bootdisk from bootdisk.com and same thing. I thought maybe the drive I was using to create the boot disks was bad. I tried a different to drive to make the bootdisks. and so and an so fourth

Eventually I figured maybe all the floppies in the box had gone bad, even though they are new (non-used), and others from that box had worked in the past. So I tried reading the files and some of the disks were unreadable, - verified this on another computer.

So I got different disks. It still didn't work. So I thought maybe instead of the Dell executable that makes the bootable floppy with the BIOS upgrade, I'll try the manual way. So I made a bootable floppy, and then added the plain BIOS exe. Finally I got the BIOS updated. I guess it was a combination of bad disks, and a non-working automated Dell executable?

I did this in Windows. But I wanted to learn how to do it Linux.

I googled how to make a bootable ms-dos floppy in Linux. I thought there'd be a few commands or something. The only thing I found was a long and way-too-complex process for using FreeDOS. -which some people don't trust their BIOSes with.

Is this the only way to do it? It looked like the recipe for an advanced network server setup. I was lost in the second paragraph. Is there an easy way? Or does everyone use Windows or DOS to make a ms-dos bootable floppy to upgrade their BIOS?