Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
then when the upgrade is complete, remove the floppy and reboot the system.
Because floppy drives are no longer installed in most systems and the BIOS images for modern
motherboards are often too large to fit on a floppy anyway, many motherboard manufacturers offer
downloadable images of bootable CDs for BIOS upgrades. These are normally in the form of an
*.ISO file, which is an optical disc image file containing a sector-by-sector copy of a disc. To
perform the upgrade, you need to write the ISO bootable image file to a blank disc. Unfortunately,
Windows versions prior to Windows 7 don't include optical disc burning software that can read or
write ISO images, which means that you need a third-party program to accomplish this. Commercial
optical disc burning programs are sometimes included with new systems or optical drives, so you
might already have the necessary software on your system. If you don't already have such a program, I
recommend ImgBurn (
www.imgburn.com
), which is an excellent free optical disc burning
application.
Use your burning program to generate the disc image by copying the ISO file to a blank disc. To
perform the upgrade, first ensure that the optical drive is set in the boot sequence; then, restart the
system with the upgrade disc in the drive. The system should boot from the disc, and the upgrade
procedure should start and run automatically. Follow the prompts to complete the upgrade and then,
once the upgrade is complete, remove the disc and reboot the system.
User-Created Bootable Media
Many motherboard manufacturers also offer BIOS upgrades in the form of a raw DOS-based flash
utility combined with a BIOS image file, which you can run manually from any DOS-bootable media.
Using this technique, you can perform the upgrade from a bootable floppy, optical disc, or even a
USB flash drive, regardless of whether the system hard drive is running Windows or Linux or even if
it has no OS. The necessary files are normally contained in an archive that you can download from the
motherboard manufacturer. Unfortunately, this type of procedure is much more labor intensive than the
others because several steps are involved. One particularly difficult part is the manual creation of the
bootable media to which you will copy the files. Although it is fairly straightforward and simple to
create a bootable floppy, the procedure for creating bootable optical discs or USB flash drives is
more involved.
Fortunately, some free utilities are helpful. For creating a bootable CD for BIOS upgrades, I
recommend the Clean Boot CD package, which you can download for free from
www.nu2.nu/bootcd/#clean
. Download the self-extracting executable package into a new folder and
run it, which extracts the additional files and folders within. Then follow the directions to copy the
flash utility and image files for your motherboard into the proper folder. After the files are in place,
you can run the “build-clean” command, which automatically builds and creates an ISO image of a
bootable CD, complete with an OS and your files included. You can then use a third-party CD/DVD-
burning program such as ImgBurn (
www.imgburn.com
)
to copy the ISO image to an optical disc.
After you have burned the disc, you can boot from it, navigate to the folder where your flash utility
and image files are located, and enter the appropriate command to execute the upgrade. For Intel
motherboards that use the IFLASH.EXE utility and image files with an *.BIO extension, the proper
command would be
IFLASH /PF XXX.BIO
, where you would replace XXX.BIO with the actual
name of the BIO file you have.
You can accomplish the same procedure with a bootable USB flash drive, but just as with the
creation of a bootable optical disc, creating a bootable USB flash drive can be somewhat involved.
