Why Do We Have to Use a Floppy to Flash BIOS? 174
Koskun asks: "With all the time and technology that has come and gone with computers why must we still use a floppy disk to flash the BIOS anymore? Yes, some manufacturers are enabling BIOS flash from within Windows, but there are still a lot of motherboards out there that require you to find a floppy to flash the BIOS. It took me two floppy drives and four floppy disks just to find one of each that worked." Are there reasons why BIOS manufacturers haven't moved BIOS flashing to modern media like USB flash drives, or bootable CD-ROMs?
Because (Score:3, Insightful)
The answer is: Mu (Score:5, Insightful)
To save myself from burning a CD every time an update was released, I created a tiny (100 meg) FAT16 partition and just one DOS boot CD. I couldn't access the NTFS drives from DOS, but the FAT16 partition containing the BIOS images was no problem. I stopped having a floppy disk drive attached to my computer years ago.
And of course, these days I just flash from within Windows. The (perceived) added danger of things going wrong makes it all more exciting!
Perhabs a better question would have been - are there ways to flash from within Linux these days? Last I looked (a long time ago), I couldn't find anything reliable.
Why are we still using BIOS's (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Why are we still using BIOS's (Score:2, Insightful)
If someone can get every BIOS maker, motherboard maker, video card maker, SCSI card maker and network card maker to all simultaneously (a) switch to a different pre-boot environment, or (b) include code for both the existing AT-style pre-boot as well as a hypothetical newer environment; escaping the AT-style POST environment won't happen.
...But you don't need BIOS in Linux! (Score:3, Insightful)