UpdateBIOS ??

[Cain]

How do you update your BIOS without a Floppy Drive ??

[BenKenobi]

I don't know but I did it with my CD drive. When I updated it I think I had to do "boot from CD" in the bios. See if you can find it.

[Devilguns]

You might have a setting to boot from USB too.

[Trooper110]

Asus has a Windows utility that will do it, not sure about other mobo manufacturers. Never did try it as I have a floppy drive for just such occurences, but it's supposed to work fairly well.

[TheSilentAssassin]

If you have a Dell (unfortunately) their site provides the updates

EDIT: Just updated mine thanks to this thread. Probably took less than 2 minutes...

[{CLR}geneSW]

Asus has a Windows utility that will do it, not sure about other mobo manufacturers. Never did try it as I have a floppy drive for just such occurences, but it's supposed to work fairly well.

works fine. USB will work as well on new boards as the option to flash should be in the BIOS. Should ask you where the file is, tell it it's the removable drive or something along those general lines.

[juneau]

Please do NOT use a windows based application. Floppy or USB is are the best ways.

[drunken_chef]

funny answers. for me at least. what motherboard, system are you wanting to do this with cain?

[drunken_chef]

Please do NOT use a windows based application. Floppy or USB is are the best ways.

would you expand on that. for my knowledge

[Cain]

Flashing a BIOS is something you can EASILY screw up your MB and in "the old days" you may have to ship it back to the mfg to get it fixed.

I cannot imagine using Windows to Flash a BIOS, but perhaps it can be done.

Who here has flashed their BIOS, what Company made the MB, and which one had the best Flash utility >???

I have flashed Asus, Tyan, and a few others. But it appears to me if little has changed in the way of BIOS flashing to make it any easier.

I was not planning to have a Floppy in my new PC, then I needed to flash the BIOS on this one, and thought "Oops" !!

[CarbonFire]

I've used Gigabyte's Windows Bios Utility to update my motherboard's bios. I know, I know, sacrilege

I'd say boot to USB or bootable CD are still your best update options. Either way, the Mobo manufacturer should provide some sort of utility to create said bootable disk for easy flashing. Floppy just isn't needed anymore.

And even if you do manage to screw up a bios update, most motherboards these days have some kind of fail safe to bring the bios back.

[Cain]

[Apache Warrior]

I have flashed Bios with MOBO from MSI and Asus. Both have a utility that will dl and flash all at the same time.
Apache

[juneau]

If you have flashed via windows then count your lucky stars. It has a very high fail rate due to windows creating a lot of background activity.

Using a floppy or USB stick on boot is very safe, and while there is a very small chance it could still mess up, it's less then 1%. The only thing you really have to worry about is if you have a power cut while updating.

[WalkinTarget]

Every board I've owned in the past two years I have updated the BIOS on. Like Carbon mentioned, I've used Gigabyte's Windows utility (EZBios) to flash it, and also used a similar setup on my MSI board that is my main rig.

As some have mentioned, a BIOS update is only done when necessary, but in my case I had to update to have it see a newer CPU, or even in the case of an older Soltek NF3 board, it wouldn't ID the Venice core CPU that I put in it and consequently halved the amount of RAM (!!!!) that the board should have seen.
Pretty strange when your PC shows half of the RAM that it previously had just after a CPU upgrade !

Its been three builds now since I put a floppy in one of my rigs, but I do miss the DOS BIOS flash days, but only briefly, may I add.