Flash bios without floppy?

PretzelB · Post by **PretzelB** » Fri Feb 08, 2008 7:25 am

Seems like I tried this a year ago and never got it to work but is there a way to flash the bios when building a new system without installing a floppy? I'd like to keep the case clean and not have a floppy and I just realized I don't have a spare one so I'd really like to avoid buying a new one. But I didn't think there was a way to install something AWDFlash on a CD.

theycallmebruce · Post by **theycallmebruce** » Fri Feb 08, 2008 8:30 am

It can be done my friend. I flashed my BIOS from a USB flash disk yesterday. I imagine it would work with any media which is bootable from your existing BIOS. Assuming this was created in the last ten years, this should include CD.

Just make the device bootable. For a CD, use burning software which creates a bootable image.. most of them do this. For USB flash, there is an HP tool to format it to make it bootable. If you wanted to get really excited, you could even use PXE to boot over a network and flash it that way. Then set your BIOS boot order to boot from the desired device first, and run the flash utility as normal.

MalcolmC · Post by **MalcolmC** » Fri Feb 08, 2008 11:17 am

Did it this morning on an Asus P5e, using a USB drive. There is an update tool when you go into the BIOS settings (there are also other ways on this motherboard).

seraphyn · Post by **seraphyn** » Fri Feb 08, 2008 11:30 am

USB flashing works great, never had a problem.

Post by **NeilBlanchard** » Fri Feb 08, 2008 7:52 pm

Greetings,

On some motherboards (Asus), you can flash it from within Windows.

frostedflakes · Post by **frostedflakes** » Fri Feb 08, 2008 10:05 pm

Yeah I thought quite a few motherboards could be flashed from Windows. This is how I've done it with most of my boards and never had an issue.

USB flash drive should work as well, you can use the Dell USB boot utility to make the drive boot to a dos prompt. There are other methods but they are a bit more involved.