How to update bios with no floppy?

[HeresyDW]

I went to upgrade the bios on my Soltek DRV2 today, only to realize that I never installed a floppy drive in this machine.

Has anyone ever updated their bios from a bootable cd-rom?

Any other ideas of how to get around this without installing a floppy drive?



p.s. I'm running XP.

 

[panhead49]

yes you can use a bootable cd rom or the hard drive......most people without a floppy use there cd-r

 

[Buz2b]

It's possible to update the BIOS from the hard drive but you still need a boot disk. Also, I have to ask: Why don't you just install a floppy? It's cheap and a ten minute job at most. Curious.

 

[HeresyDW]

Thanks for the replies. I'll use a bootable CD-R and go from there.

As for "why not just install a floppy?". That was always an option, but really bios updating is the only thing I think I would ever need to boot from a floppy from at this point. I can't see installing a piece of legacy hardware just for that.

 

[THUGSROOK]

if you have a "D:" drive you can put the boot/flash files in the root dir and boot to that drive.


...i always thought it wasnt possible to flash from a non-rewritable drive? (cd)
even a non re-writable floppy wont work.

 

[Jeff7]

You can flash from a non writable drive; you just can't save the existing BIOS to a file on that drive.

 

[THUGSROOK]

hiya jeff!

i mean, of course i couldnt save the bios to disk

i just remember years ago that bios flashing would crash on me if the floppy diskette itself was set for "read only". (p2bf, p3b-f days) since then i always just assumed that it needed to be writable.
nowadays i just use my D: - why waste a cd?

 

[Finite]

Thats a waste of a cd-r. Better use a cd-rw. Couldn't you also just boot to a command prompt and flash from there? 95,98, 2000 and XP can be booted to command prompt only. Don't think ME can.

 

[THUGSROOK]

nooooooooooo...

DO NOT boot to a command prompt to flash your bios :Q

 

[CoDerEd]

yeah i think use your second hd is the smartest choice.

 

[idgaf13]

I remember downloading a BIOS update from ocworkbench for the ECS K7S5A.
I do not know how they did it but it was designed to be downloaded and burnt to a CD
then to use the CD to flash the BIOS
worked very nice.
Never did get any help with how the file,flash utilty and BIOS, was generated

Any Ideas ?
Floppies are a bore and unrerliable.