Cross Platform BIOS Flash Upgrades?

niko9 asks: "I am a Linux user who lives in an all Linux household. I build all my Linux boxes from components that I know will play nice with Linux. I was recently contemplating building a box with a Tyan Tiger K8W dual-Opteron motherboard, as the original BIOS did not provide support for the built-in Intel Gigabit NIC. Tyan has since released a BIOS revision, but the instructions for flashing the BIOS explicitly state that you need a Windows 95/98 boot disk. As someone who doesn't know anyone who runs Windows 98, nor do I own any copies of any Microsoft operating system, how does someone complete the delicate task of a BIOS upgrade? Wasn't Windows 98 recently retired? An email to Tyan's tech support has so far not yielded any response. When will motherboard manufacturers realize that upgrading your BIOS is better off being a neutral OS event? Does anyone know of any motherboard maker that doesn't require a specific OS to flash a BIOS?" A simple solution is to not fight the requirement. Windows and DOS bootdisks are readily available on the Internet, and all you need to do is grab a floppy, write the image to it, and put it in a safe place for such occasions. The gist of the question is still valid, however: what will it take to get BIOS manufacturers to make an OS neutral BIOS upgrade path?

Well,

[Sevn]

I know how I did it. I did a search on google for a "dos boot disk image", found one, downloaded it, then used "dd" to make it. After that it was a matter of mounting the dos floppy and copying my new bios file to it. Reboot, run flash.exe, done.

Bootdisks

[sdelement-x]

try out http://www.bootdisk.com/ This web site has a range of bootdisks from win95 to win2000 and so on. If you ever need a bootdisk, I'm sure it'll be there.

Oh my god, quitcher bitchin'!

[thenerdgod]

Okay, first off, "offering an .iso of OpenBSD" is the most ridiculous solution I'v ever heard. Why not just ship an EEPROM burner?
How about this: They require a DOS boot floppy because
a: These tools usually operate in real mode
b: DOS is real mode
c: DOS fits on a floppy
d: DOS isn't free

Oh, wait, DOS IS FREE [freedos.org].
STOP WHINING. Your knee-jerk reaction to "this needs DOS" is to think inside the box and whine about how MSFT eats babies and is a monopoly and nobody considers freedom important and TEH LUNIX ROXORZ J00!.
Just get a DOS boot disk from freedos, or any of the other DOS-alikes. That's what I do. It's useful to have around... Sure. In some Magical Future, we won't have floppies or DOS. And then you can burn a FreeDOS .iso, I'm sure.
My god, people, show a little flexibility.

More neutral than dos?

[Anonymous Coward]

C'mon, what is more neutral than dos? Espicially with win9x officially leaving the support track what other use is there for dos?

I want linux, down with MS is less than a neutral mantra.

How about MOBO makers supply you with a memory card from an old tandy... wait how about old NES cartridges, who knows what OS is on them.

My sarcasm is not meant to fan the flames but choose your battles man. Changing bios upgrade methods to a truly neutral format isnt going make anyone feel warm and fuzzy except you.

Re:Buy another board

[Zathrus]

Oh please.

A "Windows 95/98 boot disk" is nothing but a DOS boot disk. If you don't have DOS or Windows, then just get FreeDOS [freedos.org], an open source version of DOS. It'll work just fine for a boot disk for ROM flashing. There's even a single diskette "distro" that you can download (although, frankly, you don't need anything more than kernel.sys and command.com as best I can tell). They even have a FAQ on this. And two manufacturers (MSI and ASUS) ship it with their utilities.

Good luck finding anyone who will provide a linux flash utility. There are a few manufacturers who will read the BIOS off a floppy disk (Gigabyte), a few that provide DOS or Windows flash utilities, but there's no software that I know of to do Linux flashes, nor is there any support in the kernel to do so (google for it -- there was some work on /dev/bios, but as best I can tell it's a deeply outdated hack now).

It's not "allegience to MS", as much as you might wish your little conspiracy theory to be true. It's called simplicity. Under DOS you don't have to worry about any other process interrupting the BIOS flashing. If another program was to do so, while the BIOS was being overwritten, and happened to need a BIOS call to a location that wasn't shadowed then all hell could break loose. DOS is freaking simple in this way (and before anyone says anything about TSRs -- it's recomended that you not have any loaded).

Quite frankly this is a lame Ask Slashdot. If the original asker had bothered doing any research on the subject they would've discovered a multitude of perfectly legal options available.

Re:Oh my god, quitcher bitchin'!

[Saiai Hakutyoutani]

If you're so smart, then provide a FreeDOS ISO that works with most BIOS upgrades before yuo start bitching.

Dont Do It!!!

[jcavanaugh]

I tried once to use FreeDos to flash upgrade the bios on a Tyan board. (I also did not have Win98 anywhere in the house).

Big Mistake. It vaporized my bios and I had to resort to unusual methods to recover the board. Fortunately I had 2 of the exact same board, so I was able to remove the bios eproms from both boards and copy from the good one to the corrupted one.

Freedos might be good for a lot of things, but bios flash upgrades isnt one of them...

Caveat Emptor...

--
John Cavanaugh

Some do.

[RustyTaco]

Well, sort-of. Compaq is now providing Linux binary-magic-wrapped-in-a-shell script BIOS updates for some of their servers. I upgraded a Proliant ML530(G1) and it's RAID controler from within Debian/sid rather painlessly. It's not cat new.bios.bin > /dev/mtd0, but it's probably safer that way.

- RustyTaco