My desktop at home is a system I assembled myself:
- CPU: AMD 64 3200+ Venice 2.0GHz Socket 939
- Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-K8NXP-SLI
- Memory: 2GB of Kingston ValueRAM 1GB 184-Pin DDR SDRAM DDR 400 (PC 3200)
- Video Card: eVGA GeForce 6600GT PCI-Express
I’d like to upgrade the CPU to a AMD dual-core processor, ZipZoomFly has the AMD X2 4800+ for $209, and it’s out of stock! But, before I can upgrade the CPU I need to update the BIOS. Currently, the BIOS is version F7 and it looks like I need F9 or greater to support the newer processors (I bought the motherboard in 2005 before the X2’s were available).
There are 2 ways to update the BIOS:
- Use a Windows Utility
- Update with a DOS boot Disk.
I only have Debian GNU Linux on the system, and I don’t have a floppy drive which is what you need to make a DOS boot disk. I dual-boot my laptop between Windows XP & Ubuntu Linux, because I need WinXP to VPN to work they just dropped Linux VPN support … but’s that another story if anyone asks I’ll tell it! 🙂 But, the laptop doesn’t have a floppy drive either! It be nice if Motherboards manufacture could provide bootables images so us non-Windows users could just write it to a CD-ROM or a USB drive and boot and flash the BIOS from there.
I know I’d created a DOS boot CD-ROM using Linux a few years ago but I couldn’t quite remember how. I found the old disk image I’d created and mounted it using the loopback interface, but just couldn’t remember what I had to do to … well thanks to that new fangled Google thing I found this: http://www.nenie.org/misc/flashbootcd.html. After 5 minutes of trying to figure out the arguments to cdrecord to tell it what device was the CD-writer and cdrecord -scanbus return nought I used K3B to write the image the image to the CD. But, just what a pain in the backside ….