Flashing the bios from usb

Does anyone here have a lot of experience with flashing the bios of a computer?
I have an intel board that I want to do a bios flash on, and the manual says to flash it from a floppy drive. Well I dont have a floppy drive - who uses them anymore? the board is a WS440BX that is an old (circa 2000) pentium III
board with a phoenix bios
It has the intel 440 chipset and is an OEM version allocated to Gateway 2000 company. The bios would boot from usb or cd if I set it to do that but want to know if its safe during a bios upgrade

I dont know if I read it on intels site but I have read on forums of people flashing other boards from usb and Hewlet Packard make a flash key bootup utility that works on most usb flash drives, If you have any advice plz hlp
if not usb then how about from the CD? This is a risky operation I know it can render the machine useless if the flashing goes badly so I need some
evidence that what you say is true

 

Hi, could you post the model number on the mother board?
It is usually a matter of running a small binary file in a dos environment.
You can enter a dos environment by pressing F8 while the system starts to boot then selecting "Command Prompt" or similar.
I haven't used windows regularly for a few years now so I could be wrong...

 

It does say on the intel site that since XP, 2000, and NT
do not run dos , you cannot flash the boards from the command prompt it will crash - only win 95 - 98 and ME can be done that way

 

Sorry for the duff info :O

 

I have a windows boot disk image for you here.
You might be able to dd (disk dump) it onto your usb stick with a knoppix disk or similar like so:

Code:

dd if=/path/to/winboot of=/dev/sda

Where /dev/sda is your usb device, run:

Code:

dmesg

just after you plug the usb stick in to get the correct device name.
The stick should then be bootable but you will have to reformat it afterwards to make the stick useable again!

Or look for a suitable windows app to do it, or, as you say, use it as an image to make a bootable cdrom.

 

Ok thanks very much,
so basically I run the dos disk and then run the bios upgrade?
which is stored on the dos disk
or do I install the upgrade on the disk and the upgrade runs automatically
when I reboot?

 

hmm, this is the tricky bit: that old disk I gave you only recognises fat32 not ntfs, so once booted you won't be able to see your xp's C:\ drive.

Perhaps you can get a command prompt out of your xp install disk? Give it a try.
If you can you should put the flash excutable on C:\ then when in the command prompt you can find it easily.
Run it like any dos program, just type:

Code:

C: [ENTER]
flash.exe [ENTER]

...where "flash.exe" is the name of that flash file you got for your bios.

PS. Do you absolutely need to upgrade your bios? They often fix small bugs that don't affect you...

 

i dont know if this applies:

some machines have a function where you can hold down a key or keys when you hit the power on switch. my apple laptop does this and i heard of others that could use this function. google it up and maybe it is easier than you thought.

 

Thanks for the info - I am hesitant to flash this bios because it is perhaps the riskiest legitimate operation you can perform on a computer. I will work ou the best way I think what I will do is try to find someone on the net that knows about this intel board and see what they say.
Your advice and help is very much appreciated though and if you think of something you think might work please let me know