Why is rufus not available under FreeBSD ?

[Dave Cottlehuber]

On Tue, 28 Jan 2020, at 15:37, Manish Jain wrote:
> 
> Hi all,
> 
> I had to update my BIOS a couple of days back, and for that I needed a 
> bootable DOS USB pen drive. The only way to get this, I believe, is 
> Rufus - which is Open Source and is available under Linux.

I've dealt with this in the past, and IIRC it's mildly painful but not
catastrophic.

option 1, DIY, recent BIOS:

make an MBR partition, then use newfs_msdos on it.

https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=newfs_msdos

All my UEFI-ish firmwares support updating their firmware from a FAT
partition, it didn't actually need to be bootable. Intel, Supermicro, Dell,
even my AS rock thing can cope with this.

option 2, FreeDOS if you need something bootable:

https://derek.chezmarcotte.ca/freedos-1-1-usb-boot-image already did
almost all the work, but if you don't trust random internets then it's
feasible to do it from FreeDOS directly.

options 3, iPXE boot to DOS.

back in the day, this was how we booted Normal Computers anyway. I've
not tried it but there is no particular reason why it wouldn't be
sufficient. https://possiblelossofprecision.net/?p=2312 for example.

In all cases you need to do some legwork to extract the necessary bits
off whatever godforsaken image your vendor has forced upon you, onto
the USB drive. I generally hand-edit the batch files to avoid needless
reboots and changes.

A+
Dave