How would I update BIOS for Asus A7N8X with no floppy drive?

[dskaplan]

I never put a floppy in my computer when I built it. I figured it would be absolutely useless for me. Now I need to update my BIOS, since I have a very old version. How could I do this? I have a CD burner, so if someone would be so kind as to just tell me what files to put onto a CD to make it bootable, I can make a boot CD w/ the flash utility and the proper update file.

Thanks!!!

 

[bendixG15]

Spend 10 bucks for a floppy.....
Saves hours of learning time and risk of killing BIOS
Thats my opinion.........but I like floppies
Anyways..Good Luck

 

[Schadenfroh]

asus has a way of flashing it from windows. and btw death to floppies

 

[Lord Evermore]

You need an image of a bootable floppy disk to burn to it. Some burning software also has such images built-in so you don't have to have a floppy to pull an image from. Once you have the bootable floppy image and the CD burned, you can then add files to the CD which will show up as being on the CD drive letter in DOS. Make sure your bootable floppy image contains drivers for CD, like a normal Win98 disk. You can then save that disk, and later add other image files to it for future flashes or other uses (just make it a multisession disc).

If you search with Google, you can easily find places to get a pre-made image that can be burned to a CD, even programs that create a bootable disk automatically and include any files you want on the disk.

 

[redbeard1]

Almost all motherboard makers tell you to boot your system, with nothing loading into memory, such as no config.sys or autoexec.bat loading things on boot. Making a bootable cd, and having it mount so that you could programs run from it may be pushing that. In the time spent fooling around getting things set up on the cd, it may just be easier to find a floppy to borrow for a little while.

If you were using win98, you could copy the files to the hard drive, and then press F5 as the system is booting, which bypass's all start up files, and gets you to a c:\ prompt. Then you could maneuver your way to the directory where you downloaded the bios upgrade files, and run it from there.

 

[xSauronx]

Originally posted by: Schadenfroh
asus has a way of flashing it from windows. and btw death to floppies

havent used a floppy in 3 years

youd think people would have figured a way to completely not ever need them at all by now huh

 

[Lord Evermore]

There are ways. Some of them are just annoying, or cost too much. Just don't see the sense in disposing of something that works for the limited uses it still has.

The reason board makers say boot with nothing loading is simply because it reduces the stuff in memory, which removes variables that might result in a crash. Some CD drivers aren't likely to cause the system to crash after it's loaded up.

Flashing from the hard drive is the way I usually did it until I moved to WinXP.

 

[jackschmittusa]

Make the bootable cd as suggested above with the cd drivers. I use a Win98 boot setup as it creates a ram drive. I then load the flash utility and the rom file into the ram drive, then execute the flash.