Economy Size Geek

I don’t have a floppy drive. (Not absolutely true - I mean there is one somewhere in my lab - but I can’t find it - and it’s the only one I have).

I admit I kicked the floppy habit thanks to Steve Jobs. My Wallstreet Powerbook didn’t come with one standard and I didn’t bother to buy one. Turned out I never really needed it.

Times have certainly changed - there was a time when the floppy was an incredibly important transfer device. But alas -it’s gone - replaced by optical and usb media.

This wouldn’t bother me much - it’s not like anyone ships floppies any more right?

That would almost be true - except for bios updates :( On my home workstation they finally released a tool so I can do the upgrade under windows (Which is not a big deal since that machine actually has windows on it)

Recently I dusted off my mini-itx box. (I’ll post about that project once it really gets going). As part of the process I found out that it is running a bios that is about 2 years behind the current one. I figure it’s probably a good idea to make it current. The problem - well they recommend making a boot floppy - and as I said - I can’t find my drive…

There is another option - bootable cdrom. I’m liking the sound of that. I ended up using a mixture of linux and windows to do this - though you could actually do it purely under linux if you have a burner in your linux box (which I didn’t - hence the switching)

First get a bootdisk for dos - where do you get such a thing - bootdisk.com of course. If you go to the bottom of the list you can find images for non-windows platforms - which is what you want. The windows platform ones are programs that expect - you guessed it - a floppy disk to write thier image onto.

Once you have your dos boot disk image on your linux box - mount it with

mkdir disk
mount -oloop,rw disk.img disk


This lets you modify the contents of the disk image - important because you basically need to put the flash software and the new bios on to the disk image. You have to delete some stuff - I recommend starting with qbasic.*.

Copy your flash program and the firmware onto the image. Umount the disk image. Now if you have a burner in your Linux now is when you would burn a cd image using this image as the floppy portion for booting. (You see bootable cdroms sort of cheat by keeping a fake floppy image as part of their structure so when you boot from cdrom you are technically booting from floppy first - AFAIK)

In my case I downloaded my new dos image to a windows box with a burner and fired up a cd burning tool - told it - make a bootable cd - pointed to my image as the floppy image for booting and burned it. It’s truly amazing how fast you can burn 1.4MB of data onto a cdrom. (Also funny is that cdr media is so cheap it doesn’t even bother me that I’m making a cd I’m probably only going to use once in my life)

Put that cd you just burned in your machine and tell bios to boot off of it - and away you go.

My mini-itx is now happily upgraded and ready to for the project.