BIOS Flashing under Linux
From CLUG Wiki
Need to re-flash a BIOS without Windows / DOS?
There are several options:
Contents |
Floppy Flash
There are several boot floppies you can use:
- FreeDOS - you want to find a file called
fdos1440.img- You will need to strip it down to make space for the flash image - can someone add a list of files that can safely be removed?)
- This is a nice option because it comes with it's own flashing program.
- or you can just download the fboot disk http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/distributions/1.0/fdboot.img
- MS-DOS
- Most of us have a legal copy of this we can use.
- You can also download a nice image @ http://colt.projectgamma.com/bios/win98-boot.img looks this project no longer exsists ??
- etc.
Mount the image:
mount floppy.img /mnt/tmp -o loop,uid=myusername
and remove junk you don't need, and copy in the BIOS image and flashing utility.
Unmount it:
umount /mnt/tmp
Copy it to a floppy:
fdformat /dev/fd0 # Just so we know it doesn't have bad sectors cat floppy.img > /dev/fd0 rm floppy.img # We are done with you.
reboot and flash.
CD-R Flash
As above, but instead of copying it to a floppy, make an iso image and burn it to CD-R(W):
mkisofs -r -b floppy.img -c boot.cat -o floppy.iso floppy.img cdrecord dev=/dev/cdrw -dao floppy.iso rm floppy.img floppy.iso # We are done with you.
reboot and flash.
Netboot Flash
You can use memdisk to boot to an emulated a floppy disk (using an image) from grub or pxelinux.
It’s part of the syslinux package on Debian/Ubuntu, and hides in /usr/lib/syslinux/memdisk.
In PXELINUX, the config file would look like this:
DEFAULT memdisk initrd=FILENAME.img
In Grub, like this:
title Bios Flash kernel /boot/memdisk initrd /boot/FILENAME.img
Caveat emptor: apparently some flash tools don’t like memdisk, so YMMV
Risky: Native Linux Flash
FreeBIOS has a flashing utility in it. Use that under Linux. The utility is called flash_rom.
Enjoy.
