MSI Bios Flashing Instructions For Non-FAT .... help?!

[Suikakujyu]

MSI's bios flashing instructions suggest that you should run the flash utility off the hard drive. And for those who use NTFS that they use a win98 or ME boot disk so you can copy the flash utility onto the RAM-Drive created and then run the utility off that.

My question then is, why can't i just run the utility off the boot disk itself? There's enough space on the floppy to fit the flash utility and files. I don't have a 98 or ME boot disk and i think the steps they are giving are rediculous.

In addition to my question above, has anyone just flashed their MSI board's bios from the floppy directly? How did it turn out?

Thanks

 

[Lord Evermore]

Floppies are slow. They're probably thinking it's faster to copy it to the RAMdrive then run the flash program, than to have the flash program reading it off the floppy (a straight copy operation would be faster than the transfer from the floppy to the flash program, since it would only copy part of the file at a time). It's certainly faster to do it from the hard drive, if you can, since you don't have bootup delays from a floppy.

Floppies are also unreliable, so keeping it on the hard drive would be better anyway.

I use a bootable CDR to do mine now, since my floppy is unreliable as hell with this motherboard.

Oh, I also found that one flash utility WOULD NOT run when I booted with a WinXP boot disk (which uses WinME's DOS version). I forget which one it was that wouldn't work, but when I switched to an alternate Award flasher, that worked fine.

You can get boot disk images for floppy from bootdisk.com. The ones by w0rm are very "complete", but rather sizable as far as the space taken on the disk, but they let you do anything, including read NTFS. The second listing, "Most Excellent" is bootdisk.com's originals, which are handy and have many OS versions.

 

[Suikakujyu]

wow... uh to say the least... you rock! thanks!