conflicting views on flashing bios

[Adul]

Epox tells me to never flash the bios from the HD Or with in Windows or windows NT.

MSI tells me to never flash a bios from the floppy, ifyou have no problems, and if you do not know what you are doing.


😛

 

[odog]

never flash bios from a floppy? did a crackhead pickup the phone at MSI?

i'll never trust those damn windows flashing utils....... floppy/dos based flashers rule the earth.!!

 

[Adul]

this is from their website actually.

 

[Davegod75]

i've only ever done it from a floppy and no one should ever try it from windows. That is just asking for trouble.

 

[bozo1]

That's funny because their step-by-step instructions clearly walk you through doing it via floppy.

I bet what they meant to say was to not do it from a Win98/Me startup disk as those contain memory managers that can screw with a flash.

 

[bacillus]

IMO, flashing your bios with a non floppy method is really playing russian roulette!

 

[CTho9305]

I think it is because there is a higher chance of a bad sector on the floppy than windows crashing. Personally, I keep the images & program on the hard drive, and boot from a DOS-mode CD (no floppy disks around 😉). I think that is safest.

 

[allansaunders]

'Never flash from a floppy' does NOT mean 'flash from within windows'. What you are being directed to do is to BOOT with a floppy and then EXECUTE the flash with the .exe and new BIOS image which are on your HDD. In other words make a folder in the root on your C drive, like C:\saferflash then boot from a floppy and type C:\saferflash\whatevertheheckmyflashingutilityis where 'whatevertheheckmyflashingutiltyis' indicates whatever the heck your flashing utility is.
For people using NTFS this is problematic, so some keep a small FAT32 partition for this purpose.
Like the penguin said, this is safest. Whatever though, I have flashed many many times with a floppy, though I must say the ladies were NOT impressed ;-)

 

[jcmkk]

I don't care what MSI says, I used a floppy to flash my MSI board the other day. I saw their recommendation and laughed.

 

[Colt45]

Originally posted by: jcmkk
I don't care what MSI says, I used a floppy to flash my MSI board the other day. I saw their recommendation and laughed.

who's laughing if your floppy pulls a bad sector on your ass?

😀

i usually boot to a floppy, but run the flash util and rom of the hardrive.

ive got about 2 floppies out of 20 that work. i hate them nasty POS's.
i think the ones that do work have bad sectors too.. hehehe

 

[Adul]

Originally posted by: jcmkk
I don't care what MSI says, I used a floppy to flash my MSI board the other day. I saw their recommendation and laughed.

I keep another floppy with it

 

[CTho9305]

Originally posted by: Adul

Originally posted by: jcmkk
I don't care what MSI says, I used a floppy to flash my MSI board the other day. I saw their recommendation and laughed.

I keep another floppy with it

i still think floppies are dangerous. at least use "fc /b file1 file2" to compare 2 images and make sure they are the same for a lower chance of corruption.

 

[grrl]

To be safe, I first do a complete reformat and physical scan of the floppy before flashing. I found one bad floppy that way.

Better safe than sorry.

 

[Dreadogg]

yea I use floppy also although I know the method of safeflash and would never flash from windows!

 

[Mem]

I always flash from floppy for my Epox bios updates sinch this is what Epox recommends ,however I would follow the advice that each company gives for flashing their boards,no matter what method you use none are 100% safe.

 

[jcmkk]

I can see it now. IBM is gonna have to start paying for new bios chips because someone will take MSI's advice and their IBM hard drive will crap out in the middle of the flash. I like to live on the edge, that's why I flash from a floppy. I was just thinking, wouldn't it be nice if Microsoft would give us an option of booting directly to dos when we hit the F8 key? That would be so much easier than a boot disk. That would truly make floppies obsolete.

 

[bozo1]

Well, every flash program I've used reads the entire file into memory before flashing and errs out if there is a problem with the file.

 

[ZimZum]

Originally posted by: allansaunders
'Never flash from a floppy' does NOT mean 'flash from within windows'. What you are being directed to do is to BOOT with a floppy and then EXECUTE the flash with the .exe and new BIOS image which are on your HDD. In other words make a folder in the root on your C drive, like C:\saferflash then boot from a floppy and type C:\saferflash\whatevertheheckmyflashingutilityis where 'whatevertheheckmyflashingutiltyis' indicates whatever the heck your flashing utility is.
For people using NTFS this is problematic, so some keep a small FAT32 partition for this purpose.
Like the penguin said, this is safest. Whatever though, I have flashed many many times with a floppy, though I must say the ladies were NOT impressed ;-)

Exactly, its far safer this way. Incidentally if you have NTFS you can simply boot with a win98 boot disk into DOS and load youre bios flash files from a floppy onto RAMdrive and then run it. But running directly from floppy isnt a good idea.

 

[ssanches]

I've flashed bioses several times thru the floppy, mostly with success, but I too have had a bad flash with the floppy, once where the PC hard-locked and once when it generated an error and then couldn't restore the backup. I am always happy to see the POST after a flash and that's a big sigh of relief. I recently tried Gigabyte's @bios utility, after posting here and was very happy with it's success. Since then, I've used this utility twice with positive results. The actual flashing procedure takes less than 15 seconds since it reads the .ROM file from the HDD. It's pretty safe as long as you don't use the "Update thru Internet" feature, but instead you first download the ROM file to your HDD and then flash your bios. I also regularly visit AMDMB's Gigabyte forum and till date I've only seen 1 case when the utility has caused a bad-flash (the n00b actually flashed his BIOS with the wrong ROM file

). Now I'm pretty much indifferent about which method to use. That said, I've been hearing good results from folks who've used Gigabyte's Q-Flash utility that enables you to flash the bios from within it.

 

[teddymines]

Geez, I would think that most flash utils checksum the image while in memory prior to flashing. Any bad sectors should fail floppy read and abort the whole operation. I've always used a floppy, and even done it as a precaution when nothing was wrong with the current bios.