Flash BIOS with WinXP

[InverseOfNeo]

I have an IWill DVD266u-RN motherboard and I am running WinXP Pro. How can I flash the bios? IWill's website says I have to be in pure DOS mode, and I dont have a floppy drive, so will it work if I have it on a cd?

 

[PhaZe]

I tried making a custom boot cd to replace the need for a floppy drive, but I was never successful. Luckily my motherboard let me choose my usb-zip drive as a boot device and I sent it to the first device. I copied the files from a normal win98se boot disk over to a zip disk and it let me boot off that and flash the bios.
But as long as you get into DOS, I don't think the source will matter.

 

[InverseOfNeo]

hmmm so if i make a winME boot disk, burn it to cd with bios update, boot off of it, it should work, right?

 

[PhaZe]

More complicated than that. See this.

 

[boomerang]

$8 at newegg

 

[InverseOfNeo]

Originally posted by: boomerang
$8 at newegg

Its not that I dont own a floppy drive, its that you need to be in pure DOS mode which XP does not have.

 

[boomerang]

I flash BIOS in XP as follows.

Insert floppy and right click on the drive and choose format. Choose copy system files. Format also if needed. Copy the files necessary to flash your BIOS.

Set BIOS to boot from floppy as first choice. Insert disk, boot up and have at it.

I have been formatting and copying system files from a Win98 machine. I am told that it works just dandy when done from XP also.

XP doesn't have DOS, but the files put on in this process are all you need. I've done more BIOS flashes in XP this way than I can count on both hands. It works just fine.

The only reason I posted as I did earlier is your statement "and I dont have a floppy drive".

 

[Yoyoson]

I ran into the same problem when trying to flash the BIOS on a VAIO laptop. I had made a bootdisk using ME, and copied the flashing program to it.
But.. the Phoenix Phlash program that Sony wanted me to use didn't like the fact that io.sys or msdos.sys or whatever system files ME had copied to the disk were using some kind of an upper level memory manager (for the memory past the first 640k).

Sooo... I went the old way. bootdisk.com is a great site that has images for old bootdisks. I downloaded an old DOS 5.00 boot disk... then copied the flashing utility to it. Finally.. it worked, the flashing program stopped complaining.

Hope this helps.