Flashing BIOS/Making bootable DOS filsystem on USB stick

Svein Halvor Halvorsen svein.h at lvor.halvorsen.cc
Thu May 25 12:37:30 PDT 2006


I have a problem with my laptop, and before Dell will consider taking it
back, I have to go through their checklist and make sure I've tried
everything on that list first. This includes upgrading the BIOS.


The problem is that Dell provides the BIOS upgrade in two forms:

(a) A DOS executable
(b) A Windows self-contained utility to make a boot floppy

Since I have neither Windows nor a floppy disk, I'll have to be
creative. I thought that maybe I could install some boot code on a USB
flash drive, newfs_msdos, and copy FreeDOS along with the executable (a)
mentioned above.

Problem is: How do I install the boot code on the drive? FreeDOS
provides a floppy-image, so I thought I could just dd that to my USB
drive, and boot off of that. But I need to put the BIOS upgrade utility
on the disk as well, and it is 784 kiB. Could I grow the image?

Any pointer appreciated


	Svein Halvor

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