How to flash motherboard BIOS from Linux (no DOS/Windows, no floppy drive)?

This is not flashing from Linux it is flashing from DOS without a floppydrive. The difference is that it's FreeDOS not MSDOS. Totally missleading topic.

Thank you very much! I purchased an Asus a8js yesterday, wiped off the Vista and linux. One of the things I wanted to do was update the BIOS but was having a hard time figuring out how. Your timely article helped immensely!

i wanna see how many morons bricks their machines...

Many times over the years I've gone to freedos.org looking to d/l a boot disk but for some reason they don't provide one even though for most people bios flashing is the only reason they'd need the project. I didn't know about fdos.org. Great tutorial! You might want to add something about doing this from a usb drive since it's a waste to use a cd for this (and I don't have cdrw discs).

I don't own a floppy and haven't used Windows for several years. Thanks for the tutorial.

si funciona, aunque tenia miedo al principio, pero todo resultó muy bien

gracias

A lot of people said yet this is a wrong way to say right things !!!
All the procedure is right and full functionally but it's not in LINUX OS but in FreeDos !!
Well Done surely !!!
Ciao !!!

If that's the case and you do have a floppy another way of doing this would be to use dosemu for creating boot floppy with bios update. A lot of vendors ship compressed floppy images as exe file (how to extract bios upgrade from there if not by using dosemu).

What I wanna know, would it be possible to create floppy image, insert boot menu to grub/lilo to boot from it and then flash bios? I mean, it can be done, but would it work?

Either way, there just isn't a way of upgrading bios without at least some kind of dos, whether it's M$ or some free version...

If you're making a CD ISO and have no need to "limit yourself" to the standard formatted floppy size of 1.44Mb, you'll have room for bigger files and/or more tools if you use the 2.88 version of FDOEM:

http://www.fdos.org/bootdisks/autogen/FDSTD.288.gz

Thank you very much - useful and informative

I just updated a Dell Dimension 4300 bios using a CD, and I learned a bit more command line stuff. The article helped me - it worked perfectly!

I'd like info re: usb stick booting.

David
*I only needed to change paths and sudo some commands. I am a linux novice, and this was very helpful.

So FreeDOS is Linux?

This was a great article! It was exactly what I needed. I had to upgrade an old machine that did not have Windoze or a floppy disk. The information you provided saved me a trip to the computer store to buy the floppy, and a trip to a friend's house to make a Windoze boot floppy.

Linux is truly a great system. It is amazing what you can do if you have the know-how!

Another great tool for my Linux toolbox. Thanks again.

DB

Great mini-howto! I don't understand why others bash it -
while you are technically not flashing from linux, the target audience is those who run linux or some other unixlike os. I was just in this audience: no windows, no dos, no floppy drive. I roughly knew what to do, but did not know where to find freedos, rarely edited iso images, never burnt a bootable cdrom before, this article saved me a few hours of research and trial/error. Thanks very much!

But what do I do if I'm flashing to fix my keyboard? Can I automate this so that it runs the flash program on boot?

If I go ahead and update my laptop's BIOS, will I have to do an OS re-install too? (Ubuntu Linux, fyi).

This is a VERY useful utility. If it wasn't for this post, I wouldn't have known about it otherwise, thanks much for this.

I agree, this is a very very useful utility.

The title is not at all misleading - Most of the folks search for a way to update BIOS when they are running *nix.

LG ships windows only firmware updates for their CD/DVD drives -
despite of selling an ATA drive with no mention of any requirement for M$ crap!

A case for a consumer class action?

Can't thank you enough for writing this page. Cheers!

My BIOS updater said it needed MS-DOS ;_;

Thank you, this page is exactly what I needed. I knew about freedos but did not know how to make it into a bootable CD.

In the past I've booted freedos images using either syslinux (on USB sticks) or pxelinux (booting from network). In both cases this used 'memdisk', which is shipped with isolinux and provides a virtual floppy drives from the image contents. But on that one machine, the bios did not know how to boot from USB and the flash program was somehow incompatible with memdisk... I got stuck for a couple hours until I found your page.

Thanks !

excellent !!!
thanks a lot

Dimitri
Greece

I just want to add to the comments. A really clear (can't understate how valuable that is) how-to for helping people get out of the problem of bios flashing. Works really well. However, you may want to save a copy of "FDOEM.144" if you intent to do some more flashing.

Currently running Fedora 8. I performed step 1 and got the file unzipped but could not get the "modprobe" command to work in Step 2. Message shows "command not found" The ETC directory shows two relevant files: modprobe.d and modprobe.conf but modprobe isn't there. How can I run the modprobe command to load vfat and loop into my kernel? Your help is greatly appreciated.

John D.

Instad of writting to CD, image can also be written to USB flash drive with "dd if=FDOEM.144 of=/dev/MyUsbDevice". Set BIOS to boot from USB (USB-ZIP) and You will be able to backup Your existing BIOS to disk.
WARNING - dd will erase ALL data on target device! Double check of= parameter before running it!

U could just use WINE

I've written notes on flashing the BIOS directly from linux.
This has the large advantage of being able to update the BIOS remotely,
and not mess around with boot media.

Doublecheck that everything went OK, that those two files weren't too big for the floppy:

Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/tmp/FDOEM.144
1424 990 434 70% /tmp/floppy

how do we get that information? what command do we need?

Wow, thank you. This was really helpful! I didn't really fancy having to install windows to upgrade.

I have followed your instructions and all went well.

Thank you again.

1. My files doesn't fit within 1440kB. Can I make the image larger?
2. Is it possible to make a bootable usb by do a "dd if=bootcd.iso of=/dev/sdb"? (/dev/sdb is my usb stick)

Thanks in advance
Mats

You rock!

This procedure saved me a ton of time. Fantastic!

This worked perfectly to upgrade my Abit Fatality FP-ING SLI motherboard from bios 12 to bios 16.
This has now given me 45nm. process technology support and I am now running the Intel Core 2 Duo Wolfdale processor at 2.66GHz.
I have a second Abit motherboard to upgrade soon...
Great work-thanks!

I was having a heck of a time with this. I even gave up about a year ago. Then I came back to it today and finally figured it out.

This is an excellent set of instructions. It all works. My only thing to add - the hitch that held me back - was this:

You have to --in freeDOS-- say NO to all the expanded memory options, 386, all that stuff! This is very important because if you say Yes (which is the default) then you will get a protected mode error and get nowhere with the BIOS flashing.

I think this is a really important point to make and perhaps should even be noted in the main article. A lot of people like me who aren't familiar with the command line and nuances of DOS (or freeDOS) memory management are not going to know that you MUST say NO to the default options presented when you boot this freeDOS image. I am quite relieved now that I've finally figured it out. But I was really banging my head against a wall and giving up hope until I finally decided to look into the "protected mode" error I kept getting.

Thanks for the article! For the record, I agree the title is a little deceiving because the guide requires leaving Linux to flash the BIOS. However, its a very useful guide and there probably isn't any realistic way to flash the BIOS from within Linux (I was really looking hard and tried many other ways that didn't work before I figured out the protected mode problem) so it's a great way to do it with free software and 95% Linux.

This is a very good guide, thank you. I successfully upgraded the BIOS on my new nVidia motherboard today hoping to resolve some ACPI issues. Your guide is perfect, my bootable CD worked just like a floppy, with the exception that it is read only so that the old BIOS could not be saved to it. The motherboard's ACPI implementation is still non-compliant and annoying :-) But I have a small collection of dos programs intended to run from floppy and a few of them are still useful so this is very useful experience and knowledge.

It works! I upgrated my Asus P5B Deluxe without problems!

Thanks!

I updated the BIOS on my Dell Latitude D630.

I didn't use this tutorial - and do it the same way - but if i found it before, it will take me much less time - it's good how-to. I've upgraded bios on my old ASUS P6000 this way - and it works!

Brought my Abit iL-90MV from BIOS 1.1 to BIOS 1.4, following your instructions to the letter. Everything went without incident - absolutely foolproof.

Thank you very much!

I upgraded the memory on my Dell laptop (Inspiron 5100) but needed to flash a new BIOS version for that. Dell, of course, only provides a MSDOS/Windows exe. Didn't think it safe to do it under Wine. This did the trick. Thanks!

Hi, the FDOEM.144.gz file you mention is from 2007, better try something newer, like the FreeDOS diskette downloads on rugxulo.googlepages.com ... Or of course try to make the fdos.org people update the file there.

Twice I've created CD's following the original instructions to the letter and the CD won't boot, goes right to the GRUB menu.

I had more success with the more detailed instructions which included SYSLINUX/ISOLINUX on a 2.88 Meg image, but ran into
an error loading boot.img .

I followed the instructions and everything went perfect: Flash and reboot, linux came right up. Then I turned off the power to install the 1TB disk I needed the upgrade for. 5 beeps when I turned the power back on. (OMG I killed it).
I found that on this computer (tyan k8w) I had to clear the cmos by unplugging the power supply from the mother board and changing a jumper setting for 10 seconds. conclusion: don't panic.

Thank you for cutting to the chase with this article and making my bios flash process a seamless one. For my manufacturer, I also had to install wine to get the files out of the self-extracting EXE, but other than that I was able to follow your guide to the letter... this couldn't be easier. Thanks a million!

Very good job.

Keep on rockin' !

Thanks.

Hi his is almost what I need but I don't have a FDD is there a way to write this to a flash drive.

Thanks
Steve

It worked! I was able to upgrade the BIOS of my Dell D630 from A15 to A16 (using D630_A16.EXE) from under Ubuntu 9.04. Thank you for your detailed instructions!

Hi,

please consider trying/using flashrom for flashing a BIOS next time. This is a native, open-source Linux and BSD command line utility, no need to mess with floppies or CD-ROM drives, or DOS... You can even flash your BIOS via ssh whenever you like. Packages are available for Debian, Ubuntu, Mandriva, Fedora, and some more distros.

Additionally, flashrom also supports a growing number of "external flashers", such as NICs (3Com right now, more will follow), NVIDIA graphics cards (patch is on the mailing list), SATA controller cards, and many more.

The full list of supported devices is available from:
http://www.coreboot.org/Flashrom#Supported_devices

Uwe.

I realize this thread is devoted to flashing the bios on machines w/o floppy drive but I've seen a lot of confusing stuff out there on the topic of flashing a bios under Linux and wanted to say that its an easy process with a floppy.

I downloaded HP's bios flash utility to my HD on a Windows PC, created the flash utility floppy, booted the HP Pavilion ze5400 Laptop with the flash utility floppy and it flashed the bios beautifully.

I created a boot image and it works.
Now I want to create a separate different boot image and it keeps on telling me I am out of space.
How do you clear out the old to make room for the new??

cp: writing `/tmp/floppy/ep43ds3l.bin': No space left on device

Try UNetbootin using these instructions.

I have sp42153.exe to flash my hp notebook PC. I have only ubuntu. I tried unetbootin to have bootable freedos. But it hangs at initdisk. Also I dont know what files to run from sp42153.exe even if I become successful in booting freedos. Can somebody help me? Thx

I'm sure the (various) posters intension's are well-meaning, but to a **non-expert** the various sets of flashing-instructions are mostly babble.

Given the risk & extreme costs of mobo-BRICKING, only a bullet-proof bios-flashing scheme is of value to the vast majority of those who could profit from a bios update.

How bullet-proof? Say ... a standalone native Ubuntu-app displaying a single GUI-button labeled . Hellesbelles if UBUNTU OS can query-hardware on install and auto-configure the entire OS to function with that hardware it seems plausible < to this longtime, but casual Ubuntu lusr > for firmware BIOS to be treated the same way.

1. If machine trying to start and stop in short intervals, unplug the power, open the case, take out the battery, wait a little bit, then put it in again and start. This way, you can see the newly installed BIOS.
2. Gigabyte owners check owners manual. They have ezflash facility. Download BIOS update files, write them to the vfat formatted flash disk and shutdown. Select at the beginning to enter ezflash. Point flash and you're good to go.

I need help!!

This worked great for me up until the very end. After generating the ISO image (using genisoimage) and writing it to disk I tried booting and it didn't work (error: command.com not found). After rebooting in Linux I looked at the top directory of the CD and found two files: boot.cat and fdoem.144

I was under the impression that the files should all show up in the top directory the way they did when fdoem.144 was mounted to /tmp/floppy... is that right?

I tried loop mounting bootcd.iso to /tmp/floppy the same way, and found the same two files.

I'm using Ununtu 8.10. My motherboard is almost 10 years old (Asus A7V133), so that may be the issue.

Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.

Worked like charm!
Thanks a million!

I tried this, but when I run the software to update te BIOS, it says that "it cannot be run in MS-DOS mode"....

Mi PC is a MSI Wind U120 netbook, the utility for updating the BIOS comes from the vendor itself.

Any ideas?

Thanks in advance.

Cheers!

Very clear instructions: worked fine - updating BIOS for Albatron KI690-AM2 (from 1.00e to 1.07) the BIOS now runs my AMD BE-2400 at the correct frequency now! Many thanks, would've taken ages to figure all this out.

Just updated the BIOS on an ASRock 4CoreDual-VSTA (http://tinyurl.com/create.php) with their latest (http://tinyurl.com/ylladky) using my Ubuntu 9.04 machine to create the bootable update CD. Thanks!

The main problem is that vendors are still paying blind homage to Windows.
It's like religious zealots or something. Why are we stuck in this sorry f'ing state?

back to this topic....
Here's what I've tried:

Did the cd burn thing (what a waste of plastic)
the cd booted but said "could not find command interpreter" or close
(sorry it was late last night and I was f'ing fed up)
I looked in config.sys (damn, remember this file?) and there is a line
SHELL=\COMMAND.COM (other shite options here)

Also tried dd if=FDOEM.144 of=/dev/sdc1

Nothing worked, I think my box needs a BIOS update for this to work, oh wait, I am trying to update the BIOS. Gee thanks vendors.

I wish a rich person would start a real OpenHardware initiative, I would buy that stuff. Open video cards, open mobos, open north/southbridge, etc., etc., etc.
It's the year Twenty-Ten and we are stalled.

It works perfect.. ASustek board need MS for Biosupdate, but i use Linux only ..;-)

hey there,

this link for the bootimage is dead.

http://www.fdos.org/bootdisks/autogen/FDOEM.144.gz

is there another one ?

wow...

now I don't have to keep an old machine with a floppy lying around with windows on it, just to make bios update floppies...

thanks

People with old computers might want to verify that the CD-RW disks that they have on hand will function with the PC that needs its BIOS flashed. I discovered that a 'TORiSAN CD-ROM CDR_U200 1.12' that I speculate was supplied with my Gateway SOLO 5150 laptop when it was new was incapable of reading a Plasmon 4X CD-RW disk. (I did not have other manufacturers’ CD-RW disks to try with the 5150.)

I had used my desktop PC with a Sony DVD burner to burn a copy of Puppy Linux v5.1.1 to the Plasmon CD-RW disk. Later, I used the Sony to burn this same Puppy image file to a CD-R disk that the 5150 successfully boots.

I've tried MANY other options without success! It's so made for Windows and floppy, both of which I don't and won't use.

Motherboard: KM4M-L (MS-6734)
Chipset: VIA VT8235

found nothing to work for this one.

neither the ways that was suggested here nor flashrom project.

the board has no ide, only usb to flash from.

tyan support suggested to put m$ system files from windows 98 or 95 on a usb stick and their flash package unzipped and then flash from usb.... i think i should route this to m$ for their next process against mis-usage of proprietary software..

after studying this article i tried but the bios size is 4 mb so the whole thing didnt fit into the freedos floppy disk....

after playing with bootable syslinux i found that this does not work for this board - seems to have a problem to flash if sata is in use... boots but flash does freeze - after all system was still intact (my lord, i lost a kilo or so after finding the thing was stuck in a flash ...)

so i restored an old pentium 3 box.

added a spare ide disk.

live cd fdbase.iso from freedos was running, so i created a 2GB partition (less than 530 MB the usb based flash also does not work: legacy emulation of tyan 8230 handles the thing as a floppy and the boot fails on the tyan - so much for emulations).

fat 16 format from freedos for the 2 GB partition (i hate to use fat32 - its even incompatible to other windoses..).

than installation of a minimum freedos system, shutdown the old p3 box, remove the disk.

after this i putted the disk into my tyan box with a ide-sata bridge (oh, well, even this is today needed some times).

there is no ide on the board, so no boot of freedos directly for the tyan 8230 (the sata cd drives are not recognised, boot fails when it comes to the cd rom drivers).

fdisk the partition to see for its size in blocks (2mio +) and then copied the partition to my disk

dd count=4193000 bs=512 if=/dev/sdb of=/opt/tmp/fd.img # size of blocks in fdisk * 2 + 100 reserve and so on gave count)

then copied to the usb stick (corsair flash voyager 8GB, nice working for linux and now for usb3 even better... ).

dd bs=512 if=/opt/tmp/fd.img of=/dev/sdc # no need to give a count here

mounted the stick, then copied the tyan package.

cp -r tyan /mnt/2 && sync # after this the thing was still normally looking in loop mount ...

after reboot the usb stick was doing its job.

from the boot menu i had to choose the option only high mem - all others stuck.

the flash worked. no interferance by sata or so.

its a shame, but i found no way to install from live cd directly to the usb - seems there is no way to use the sata drives even in emulation mode as a ide for freedos.

I now try to see if its possible to get a freedos image with vmware player up and running and to use this as a replacement for the pentium 3 pc.

if there is anyone interested: i will put the zipped freedos image without the tyan stuff on the web side next week, so you can download it (6MB in gzip format) and then put your own package on this.

for the usb stick any bootable with 4 GB should do the job.

If you are lucky to get hold of a boot image with cdrom drivers, use this as a boot.img with k3b and add your flash stuff as data to the cd-rw burn it as an multisession cd so you can add more flashware to the cd as needed. Once booted the cd data can be executed from the cd as your "C: drive"

Thanks for this very useful tutorial. I managed to update the BIOS on my ASUS K8V Deluxe motherboard. For some reason, the FreeDOS image from the fdos.org website does not contain command.com. I used the one from your website and that works fine. Keep up the good work!

It is possible to perform this procedure without creating an iso image and burning a CD. Simply put memdisk and the boot image on your hard drive (you can put it anywhere, but /boot is the preferred location), and then point your bootloader to it. In Grub 2, the commands (at the Grub command line) would be:

root (hd0,msdos1)
# (or whatever your boot partition is)
linux16 /boot/memdisk
# (or wherever you put it)
initrd16 /boot/FDOEM.144
boot

You can also boot an iso image by adding iso as an argument to memdisk. In Grub Legacy it would be:

root (hd0,0)
kernel /boot/memdisk iso
initrd /boot FDOEM.144
boot

I'm not familiar enough with lilo, isolinux, etc. to pull those off the top of my head, but you can figure it out.

...or you can use flashrom with awesome hot-flashing in two steps:

1. always backup (if something went wrong you'll need it)
$ flashrom -r current.bin

2. and update
$ flashrom -w latest.bin

3. Reboot

No voodoo required (except otherwise).

Thanks for the great instructions. The DOS BIOS for my Acer laptop is 2.5 MB and fits better with the 2.88 Normal Bootdisk from http://www.fdos.org/bootdisks/ with the DOS folder removed to make more room. I then made a bootable CD using K3b / New Data Project / Edit Boot Images.

mkisofs -o bootcd.iso -b FDOEM.144 FDOEM.144
tried executing as root also
I: -input-charset not specified, using utf-8 (detected in locale settings)
Size of boot image is 0 sectors -> genisoimage: Error - boot image 'FDOEM.144' has not an allowable size.

Files inside tmp/floppy
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 51657 2011-08-30 18:26 AFUDOS.exe
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 67 2004-02-22 09:16 AUTOEXEC.BAT
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 34816 2011-08-30 19:03 bootcd.iso
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 85050 2011-08-20 10:21 COMMAND.COM
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 52 2004-02-22 09:17 CONFIG.SYS
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 0 2011-08-30 18:25 FDOEM.144
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 45449 2011-08-20 10:19 KERNEL.SYS
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1048576 2011-08-30 18:25 M3N78-EM-ASUS-0901.ROM
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1486 2004-02-22 11:50 README
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 11530 2011-08-20 10:19 sys.com

Any help!!

Thank you very much for posting this - had been trying to work out best way to do it on my system for a few days and your post made sense and worked first time.

Duncs

Sorry to say that, but your command of English is atrocious. Can't you at least use a basic grammar and spell checker? All these mistakes are painful to the eyes.

How do I fix this error...?

# cp FLASHIT.EXE KM2000FR.120 /tmp/floppy
# cp: writing `/tmp/floppy/KM2000FR.120': No space left on device

Will fixing this allow me to create .iso?

This article is ageing well. I've just used it to update the BIOS on a Dell Precision M6300 running OpenSUSE. After a memory upgrade from 2G to 8G, it wouldn't get past the BIOS POST. I put the old memory back and followed your instructions. Sorted. New memory now working nicely.

Thank you very much. You have saved me a lot of messing about.

ok, i struggled with this update bios with linux issue LONG ENOUGH. after two days, i had to do it my own way, or go buy and install windows (um, NO!). so, you need TWO usb flash disks. install USB IMAGE WRITER from software center (ubuntu, sabayon, fedora) its already install in mint 14. rename FDOEM.144 to FDOEM.144.iso, and use usb image writer to write it to usb flash disk. it will make a usb disk with a 1.44mb partition, and if you can't fit your 4mb bios update on there, like i couldn't. format the second USB FLASH DRIVE to fat16 (0x06) using disks. and just copy your MSDOS BIOS UPDATE files directly to the second flash drive. now make sure both are plugged in and reboot. press F12 or whatever at splash screen to select boot device. select one of the flash drives, if it doesn't boot to freeDOS command prompt, push power button and try again selecting the other flash drive to boot from, it WILL be one of them, and there is only two. next, when at command prompt. make sure your at the freeDOS flash drive by entering "dir" which you should see the 5 files in freeDOS, autoexec.bat, command.com, etc... ok now you go searching for the other drive. enter "B:" and hit enter if it asks you to insert a floppy drive (usb is already inserted) and then enter "dir" in that drive, it might still be the freeDOS drive, if its not the same files you saw earlier, and its not a thousand files+folders (freeDOS shouldn't be able to read your linux partitions), and if it has a file like "bios.bat" then you're probably on the second flash drive which you put your bios update files on. my second flash drive was "C:" and so thats what i typed when i got to the freeDOS prompt upon booting. so, once you get to your second flash drive with all the bios update files in it, and without modifying their directories (shouldn't be any) type "bios" which executes the "bios.bat" file which then executes the bios update. my flashed in less than a minute. done.

This article worked flawlessly with Ubuntu 12.04. Had to sudo a couple of the commands, but no other changes needed. Installed A17 BIOS to a Dell Latitude D630. Thanks.

6 years later, and it worked perfectly. Thank you!

Upgraded a DELL SC1420 from BIOS version A03 to A04. First I tried the Linux bin, which I couldn't get to work, no matter the different suggestions on the web. Then I tried this way using the .exe and it just did the job. Perfect. Thank you.

adding sudo to # cp 75DVSTA2.60 ASRflash.exe /tmp/floppy didn't work. removed it and it worked. .-.

I tried installing this the way you described here on my Manjaro system. Unfortunately, I couldn't get it to work. However, I got to the step where we unmount the floppy drive (I couldn't get Step 3 to work). I managed to get my BIOS flashed using q-flash and usb drive, but when I rebooted my computer, there is a floppy disk icon on my desktop and there is 7 MiB of unallocated space showing up in gparted. The space and virtual floppy drive were not there before and I can't figure out how to remove it. Do you know anything that could help?

Thanks,

Oscar