Why Do We Have to Use a Floppy to Flash BIOS?

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?

That razor thing

[77Punker]

The simplest explanation tends to be the best. They are lazy programmers who know they won't sell many extra motherboards if they do include the extra ability.

Re:I can't agree more

[Anonymous Coward]

more expensive then cds I could have burned the image onto.

Exactly. You could have. So why didn't you? You have only yourself to blame.

Re:A floppy is......

[seanellis]

>> Everything still supports it.
> Except for the mac.

And my PC.

When I bought a Firewire board for my PC, it needed one of those small power connections from the PSU, like the floppy drive uses. Since they were all (both) already in use, I had to choose between Firewire board and floppy drive.

The floppy drive is now in my "obsolete computer bits" pile, along with my zip drive and 4x CDROM.

Re:A floppy is......

[Nagatzhul]

Apple still sells floppy drives for current model computers. Are there any PC motherboards out there that don't have a connector for a floppy? Mainstream, not specialized form factor boards.?

Four months is not that long. All the new stuff I have looked at coming in the door still has the option of updating the BIOS by floppy. We are talking mostly Dells here. Even checked the servers in the closet. They do as well.

Skipping Bootable Floppies

[CokeJunky]

The trick is that the floppy is bootable!

The spec that describes floppies and how bios's read them to boot says that the bios will load the first sector (512 bytes, IIRC) into memory and execute it. A simple solution for those old machines that ran only on floppy disks. However, because of this, when you format a floppy, the format utility puts a minimal 'boot' program in there that displays the message that you need to put a system disk in the drive and restart the computer. If they didn't do that, the bios would load whatever was in that sector and attempt to execute it.

For reference, a system disk has just enough room in that 512 bytes to get the system files loading into memory and executing.

Really though, it wouldn't be difficult to create a new standard whereby that minimal boot loader can query the bios to see if it is smart enough to continue the boot process, and if so go back to that. Older bioses would not respond correctly, and the default message could be displayed.

Wrong Question

[Kris_J]

The real question is "Why does Windows XP SP2 setup still only accept SCSI and RAID drivers from a standard old floppy drive?". I know you can slipstream drivers into an install CD, because that's what I had to do the last time I built up a PC without a floppy, but the setup routine really should at least allow drivers to be installed from a USB floppy drive by now.

My story

[angle_slam]

Yep, same thing happened to me. I have an ASUS and I could flash it from Windows. My problem is that the BIOS problem didn't allow me to even install Windows. The old BIOS calculated the CPU temperature wrong and forced a shutdown within 5 minutes of being turned on, not nearly long enough to install the OS.

So I had to flash using the floppy. I never bought a floppy drive because I didn't use the floppy in my then-current machine, so why would I use a floppy in a new machine. So I went to the old machine and tried to get the floppy out. But the screwhead is stripped! I can't get it out. It takes forever (in reality, about 25 minutes). But I finally get it out and am able to flash the BIOS.

So flashing from floppy seems annoying as hell. But if the BIOS problem prevents you from running Windows, it makes sense.

Re:A floppy is......

[linzeal]

If you do not live in the city, rural computer solutions are pricey. My local computer shoppe has 1.6 ghz laptops with no wireless selling for 2000 dollars. We do not even have a Walmart within 100 miles. I suppose we are lucky in every aspect but convience but it is an artificial economy here in Eureka, Ca. The local governing bodies oppose monopolies and large corporations in some part but there are cities that are breaking the trend and are in talks with Walmart.

Re:Why are we still using BIOS's

[drsmithy]

Probably because some crufted-over operating system of 20 years ago still doesn't know how to live without it, and even more perplexingly, is still used despite lack of a modern implementation that takes into account today's hardware and security concerns. Even you noticed modern OSs lack this problem.

False. All x86 OSes "need" a BIOS to bootstrap. Once the bootloader kicks in, however, the BIOS is irrelevant. This applies to Windows, Linux, BeOS, OS/2, even OS X/intel - all of them.

Re:...But you don't need BIOS in Linux!

[Chris Snook]

You're joking, right? Basic Input Output System. No, you don't need it doing anything terribly intelligent once it's booted, but you definitely need it to NOT be doing anything incredibly stupid. I've seen plenty of repeatable post-boot panics, device resets, data corruption, machine check exceptions, etc., that were fixed by BIOS updates. Veteran laptop users will also tell you about the huge impact the BIOS version makes on how many charge cycles your battery will go before you have to throw it out and get a new one.

Also remember that a BIOS update accomplishes a firmware update for any onboard devices (except for some rare, really weird ones). The one piece of firmware that I've seen makes even more of a difference than the BIOS proper is the firmware on a RAID card, and some boards have those built in too. (And then some have fakeraid, but that's another rant.) There are even some network cards with significant firmware bugs.

I personally will cheer when BIOS is dispensed with, so long as it doesn't get replaced with something even more hideous, like ELILO on Itanium systems. Until then, I will update it any time I have a problem I can't fix in software, or any time I can on a laptop.

Re:...But you don't need BIOS in Linux!

[runswithd6s]

The question of firmware updates extends to devices other than just the motherboard. I recall my CDRW drive having a crappy firmware version and having to update it in order to burn CD's correctly within Linux. It happens. Learning how to build a bootable CDROM with FreeDOS and the firmware program would be well worth the time investment. Personally, I think hardware manufacturers should make their own little bootable CD images that are OS agnostic to do firmware updates.