Firmware / BIOS Flashing

[bigtomrodney]

How do you guys flash firmwar/upgrade the BIOS if you don't have windows installed? Most of these utilities run under Windows. I mean is wine good enough/able to do this? I don't dual boot and I won't waste the HDD space on a windows install to get an occasional flash done. It's not very often and I haven't needed to as yet under linux but how has everyone gotten around this?

[LondoJowo]

I've always used a DRDos bootdisk because it doesn't load any drivers that could cause a corupted flash. I haven't found any firmware or BIOS update that didn't have a DOS based flash program.

[bigtomrodney]

Hmmm. Sounds like a plan except my laptop doesn't have a floppydrove. At least I'm looking in the right direction now...cheers.

[LondoJowo]

Hmmm. Sounds like a plan except my laptop doesn't have a floppydrove. At least I'm looking in the right direction now...cheers.

I've only seen BIOS updates for laptops. My T40 has a USB floppy which works fine for booting to DOS. The USB floppys are quite cheap @$20 at Walmart.

[drakebasher]

I wonder if you could write the floppy image (using dd) to a partition and then boot that partition with Grub using chainloader? But $20 for a usb floppy drive sounds pretty good!

[bigtomrodney]

I may buy a floppy drive. You can use a bootable floppy image to make a bootable CD, but you need a floppy drive AFAIK Anyway, it's about time vendors sorted this out. Even Dell releases all of it's new BIOS upgrades as executables to be run from within the OS - pity the OS is just windows.