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Media Data Storage Operating Systems Software Technology

Why Do We Have to Use a Floppy to Flash BIOS? 174

Posted by Cliff from the there's-better-removable-media-out-there dept.
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?
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Why Do We Have to Use a Floppy to Flash BIOS? More

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

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  • That razor thing (Score:5, Interesting)

    by 77Punker ( 673758 ) <spencr04.highpoint@edu> on Wednesday June 29, 2005 @05:32PM (#12945831)
    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:That razor thing (Score:3, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward

      That razor thing [wikipedia.org]
    • Well..

      my (2 year old) asus board deliverd with a freedos bootable cd that allows booting from. And it includes the flashing tools on the cd.

      A cd as distributable is much more reliable/cheaper/bigger than floppies for quite some years.

      The disadvanage is tha you need some dos-readable HD partition to put the new bios images on. FAT will do 8)

  • Because (Score:3, Insightful)

    by WebHostingGuy ( 825421 ) * on Wednesday June 29, 2005 @05:34PM (#12945854) Homepage Journal
    They haven't been forced to do so by market forces. It's the philosophy if it's not broke don't fix it. In this case they haven't been forced to do anything different by the end use customers. (And in this case you generally are the end user; HP, Dell, IBM, etc. are the next in line from the motherboard manuafacturers).
    • I think that "market forces" probably sums it up. Furthermore, the "average" user doesn't even know that a BIOS can be flashed, or what the hell a BIOS is. Therefore, it's not a priority for them.

      I'm sure that when an "average" user tries to do something that would required a BIOS flash (like using a big hard drive or changing processor or something), they usually end up being told that their motherboard doesn't support it and they need to buy a new motherboard. Which they then do...

  • not all (Score:4, Informative)

    by TheDarkRogue ( 245521 ) on Wednesday June 29, 2005 @05:34PM (#12945857)
    I use giga-byte boards, which allow me to flash from windows with @Bios or something along those lines

    • Re:not all (Score:2, Funny)

      by croddy ( 659025 )
      i can't imagine anything more hair-raising than modifying the BIOS while windows is running

      • Re:not all (Score:3, Informative)

        by Captain Splendid ( 673276 )
        Eh, it's about as hair-raising as doing anything in Windows: Kinda, but not really.
      • Sure why not - its not like windows uses it. I've yanked out the bios chip with windows running, put in a faulty one, then flashed that.
      • i can't imagine anything more hair-raising than modifying the BIOS while windows is running

        That's because you don't understand how it works. Get a new dell and flash the bios on it from windows sometime.
    • I just toasted my Gigabyte GA-8IK1100 by flashing BOTH BIOSes. When I flashed the main BIOS it, seemed to work so I flashed the backup BIOS as well but on reboot, nothing happened, not even the video BIOS would show.

      Perhaps I was just a dick with the motherboard. I guess the lesson learnt is even for dual BIOS motherboards, flash ONLY EVER UPGRADE ONE BIOS and just keep the upgrade for rainy days.

      What a damn shame, although it was the entry level 875P motherboard from their range, it was more bang for y
  • To keep the floppy industry alive.

    Stop complaining, and start backing stuff up on floppies too!

  • you don't (Score:5, Informative)

    by agristin ( 750854 ) on Wednesday June 29, 2005 @05:37PM (#12945878) Journal
    Make a boot floppy image and burn it to cd.

    Boot from cd update BIOS. I've done this about 10 times for different motherboards.

    I've even done it just from linux using dos bootdisks from the internet (I don't have dos anymore):
    1) download awdflash and bios for mobo
    2) download bootdisk image from bootdisk.com
    3) loop mount disk image
    4) delete some files to make room, pare down the autoexec.bat, put awdflash and bios on mounted disk image
    5) umount disk image and burn as a bootable cd (you can even use something like K3b or xcdroast to do this from a gui)
    6) boot from cd, and then flash bios.

    It gets niftier...

    Say you have to do this in a cluster. Keep that dos boot disk image and automate it some (awdflash has some command line switches, batch file etc).

    Then put that image on your PXE server as a bootable option. Change your DHCP server and PXE boot, then you can remotely upgrade bios on 100s or thousands of identical machines. Be careful with this part or you can make some thousand dollar paper weights.

    If you are running windows, many modern mobo manufacturers have bios updaters that run in windows.

    -A
    • I recently had this issue and the way I did it is:
      1. Download CD DOS bootdisk image off net
      2. Burn boot CD
      3. Format usb key with FAT16
      4. Put bios update files on usb key
      5. Boot from CD
      6. Change drives to usb key
      7. Update bios

      Very simple, flexible, and takes no time. You only
      burn one CD for all updates.

      • Re:you don't (Score:3, Informative)

        by BRTB ( 30272 )
        Or (if you can read USB key after a DOS boot, most likely you can boot from it):

        1. Format USB key with FAT16/FAT32
        2. Copy DOS system files to USB key
        3. Put bios update files on USBkey
        4. Boot from USB key
        5. Update bios

        Bonus points if you use SYSLINUX to choose between multiple DOS floppy images - some having network support for multiple NICs, a MemTest image, and a copy of ZipSlack.

    • Re:you don't (Score:2, Informative)

      by Miffe ( 592354 )
      Or even better

      Use memdisk [zytor.com] from syslinux to boot the floppy image directly from grub or so.
  • My ASUS motherboard can also flash itself from a bootable CD. In fact it's the only way to revert to the original BIOS in case your flash doesn't go so well and you end up with a blank screen after rebooting.

  • Linux/OSS workaround (Score:5, Informative)

    by Taliesin ( 2033 ) <b_slashdot@noSPam.thebellsplace.com> on Wednesday June 29, 2005 @05:39PM (#12945893) Homepage
    Last time I was faced with this, I found it wasn't to hard to pull of touching neither Microsoft software not a floppy disk. First this I did was to download the freely available and open source FreeDOS. I simply downloaded a pre-built bootable floppy image, though you could make your own from scratch. I mounted that floppy image in Linux using the loopback device, added the necessary flash tool and BIOS binary, and unmounted. Using my custom image, I burned a bootable CD (bootable CDs use basically the same format as bootable floppies). I popped that CD in, and the machine booted right up as if I had a put in a floppy. Ran the tool as instructed, and I had a newly flashed BIOS. A little work, maybe, but worth it.
    • But if you're running Linux, why even bother updating software that will only ever be used from the time the power turns on to the time Grub or Lilo hand off to the kernel? Seems like a big risk of blowing that code and making a big, unbootable doorstop for absolutely zero payoff.
      • Because some motherboards use the BIOS setup for such things as memory timings, processor speeds, power management settings, configuration of integrated devices like NICs and IDE controllers....
      • Because in the ACPI world, information stored in the BIOS is used for a wide variety of tasks during kernel runtime. How do you think the kernel learns how your interrupts are wired? How does it know what power saving modes your motherboard and processors support? For that matter, how does it know how many processors you have in the first place? All of this information is stored in tables in the BIOS, and a lot of the time vendors get it wrong in earlier BIOS revisions.
      • 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 an
      • 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.
  • If the BIOS and flasher can fit on a floppy, it runs in DOS. This means that I can use FreeDOS and actually flash the BIOS at all.
  • still the most universal form of storage. Everything still supports it.

    I don't see why it would be a big deal to have multiple forms of updates. I can imagine being able to update from a USB flash drive, for example, would be great for an enterprise.

    • Re:A floppy is...... (Score:4, Informative)

      by Planesdragon ( 210349 ) <slashdot@ca s t l e steelstone.us> on Wednesday June 29, 2005 @05:56PM (#12946005) Homepage Journal
      Everything still supports it.

      Except for the mac.

      And the PC built by someone trying to save $50 on a floppy drive they'd only use to flash their BIOS.

      • Where the hell do you buy floppy drives for 50? Floppys are about $8 for a generic to $12 if you go for a name brand like Teac.
        • Where the hell do you buy floppy drives for 50? Floppys are about $8 for a generic to $12 if you go for a name brand like Teac.

          That's what the Apple Store charges if you want one in your PowerMac.

          • You have not been able to get a floppy installed in your macintosh since....the G3 based beige boxes (say 1997 or so). The G3 B/W and subsequent machines had internal expandability for internal Zip drives (that was a CTO option), and there may have been third party add-on floppy drives, but you have not been able to CTO a floppy drive in a PowerMac for quite some time.

            ....or you could have been joking and mod'ed wrong :)
          • If you want a external USB floppy, it is about $30 unless you go for their "fashionable" marked up line. If you want an internal, it is $14.99 through CompUSA.

            As I said, it still supports it.
      • someone trying to save $50 on a floppy drive

        Have they started making floppy drives out of babies?

        • Re:A floppy is...... (Score:2, Interesting)

          by linzeal ( 197905 )
          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:A floppy is...... (Score:5, Funny)

            by John_Booty ( 149925 ) <johnbooty@@@bootyproject...org> on Wednesday June 29, 2005 @08:48PM (#12947197) Homepage
            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.

            If only there was some sort of digital global computer network with "sites" where you could order a computer (from one of thousands of competing suppliers) and have it mailed to your house.

          • Wow, someone else in Eureka! I was just in ACS (overpriced local shop) today. Their prices are at least 50% higher than you can get online. I only use them and other local shops for small stuff like fans, or for emergencies. I'm also pissed that you can't get simple things like cables at a reasonable price anywhere in town. Sometimes one store will have something decent (like Costco with a 3-pack of USB cables for $10), but there's a whole lot of driving around town involved to find them. I'd kill fo

          • Might I suggest pricewatch.com?

      • Re:A floppy is...... (Score:3, Interesting)

        by seanellis ( 302682 )
        >> 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.
      • A $500,000 65 GHz network analyser/BERT tester/whatever high-end RF equipment would allow you to either 1) save data to a floppy or 2) print to a (Centronix-connected) printer or 3) yeah, get data over GPIB, if you write a program/.vi to do that.

        So, I guess, the floppies are here to stay -- I know that my company-issued laptop had one BECAUSE I had to transfer data to/from those beasts.

        Paul B.
        • Yeah, but that's why God invented GPIB. If you've already got LabVIEW, it's a snap! Ditch the floppies.
          • Yeah, BUT what if you just want to A) Take some S-parameters and B) import them into Spectre/ADS/(God forbid!) Excel? No, I'm personally NOT writing the whole simulation engine (or even the frequency domain part of that) in LabVIEW! ;-)

            Of course you can tell me that I can access instruments (at least Agilent ones) from ADS via their whatever the name link (running over GPIB), but, however overpaid I was, it was still cheaper for me to haul the floppy rather than find Sun-supported GPIB card...

            Paul B.
      • >Everything still supports it.

        Except for the mac.

        Until the Intel Macs start shipping Macs don't have a BIOS... so this is a moot point
      • Except for the mac.

        I've been doing firmware updates on a Mac from the hard drive/loaded OS for at least a decade, perhaps longer.

        The PC BIOS was designed c. 1980 - Apple adopted OpenFirmware a decade later. They're going to do it again with EFI in a couple years too.

        Sometimes it's worth buying decently-designed hardware.
      • save $50 on a floppy drive

        What kind of ripoff house are you shopping at? One can easily buy a floppy drive for less than $10.
    • No computer I've bought in the past 3 years has had a floppy drive. "Everything still supports it." my ass.
      • Whether or not you had a floppy included, I am willing to bet there is still a connector on the motherboard for one. In other words still supported.
        • I want to say the last motherboard I bought did not, in fact, have a floppy connector. I'd have to check.

          I'm fairly certain that the last two notebooks I bought (2 of the 3 machines I was referring to in my post) did not have floppy connectors inside. I'll have to go read the specs on them to find out.
    • Everything still supports it.

      Except the Macintosh. And most PCs. And any laptop you're going to come across these days. And software vendors. And media manufacturers (show me a new, shrink-wrapped box of floppies that works and I'll show you a company who didn't stop making obsolete technology and switch to selling the leftovers in the warehouse from 8 years ago). Even corporate IT has shunned the floppy. I just realized the machine I've sat at every day for the last 4 months still has the floppy d

      • Re:A floppy is...... (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Nagatzhul ( 158676 )
        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.
    • Everything supports it? Funny, most manufacturers don't seem to ship floppy drives with their machines anymore, barley any laptops have them (Laptops outsold desktops in the US recently), and many people leave them out of their home machines.

      Of most of the people I know that have them, they only put in floppy drives because they had them lying around. A few who build new machines from scratch didn't get floppy drives and didn't pull them out of their old machines.

      As far as I can tell, floppies are nearly

  • Bootable CD (Score:5, Informative)

    by atomic-penguin ( 100835 ) <wolfe21.marshall@edu> on Wednesday June 29, 2005 @05:45PM (#12945940) Homepage Journal
    If you have a floppy image there is no reason you can't make a bootable CD from it. Depending on the BIOS flash program (i.e. the image is embedded in an exe or com file) you may have to make the floppy first.

    I have had to make bootable CD's in the case there wasn't a drive available on a computer to be flashed. Also, it's useful if you have to flash several computers.

    There is also the chicken/egg dilemna in the case (perhaps rare) of flashing to support bootable CD's.
    • Occasionally you get a BIOS upgrade utility that you run in Windows to create a boot disk, then you boot from the disk. It may be possible to extract the disk image from the executable, but it certainly wouldn't be a task for the faint of heart.

  • I can't agree more (Score:3, Funny)

    by nilbog ( 732352 ) on Wednesday June 29, 2005 @05:52PM (#12945983) Homepage Journal
    Seriously ... it's like using a spoon to repair an engine.
    I had to flash my bios and didn't have any floppy disks. So here I am at the store at 2am buying a package of ten floppy disks (of which I will use only 1) for $10 - more expensive then cds I could have burned the image onto.

    Anyway, I got home only to realize the computer didn't even have a floppy drive. Throw me a freakin' bone here.

  • The answer is: Mu (Score:5, Insightful)

    by moonbender ( 547943 ) <moonbender AT gmail DOT com> on Wednesday June 29, 2005 @05:58PM (#12946019)
    The question is inane. As others already have pointed out, you don't have to use a floppy to flash your BIOS, and you never had to. Yes, some boards will only let you flash from within something like DOS, but how you get to a DOS environment never mattered at all. Boot from anything, a CD, a memory stick, network, or a hard disk, it doesn't matter. Make it writable if you want to back up the current image.
    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.

    • Re:The answer is: Mu (Score:3, Informative)

      by Nasarius ( 593729 )
      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.

      Not exactly flashing from within Linux, but check out biosdisk [dell.com]. Gentoo has the package.


  • Primarily because that's how it's always been done.

    Secondarily because even if you munge the flash there is usually a very tiny portion of the BIOS that is difficult to corrupt which holds the code to boot a floppy and execute simple code fromt the floppy - meaning you can screw up your bios and still fix it with a floppy.

    It takes a lot of bios code to start a motherboard, but very little to start a floppy drive to the point where a flash can happen.

    There's no reason why this couldn't be done on
  • I've always wondered why the BIOS can't simply skip over a floppy in the boot process when it isn't bootable.

    I'm sure everyone here has left a floppy in the drive and had it tell you to remove it and then hit any key to continue. Why can't it just realize that there isn't anything bootable there and go on to the next boot device? It will skip over non-bootable CDs and DVDs fine, but for some reason, the BIOS can't do that with floppies.

    Does anyone have a clue as to why this is?
    • 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, th

    • I've always wondered why the BIOS can't simply skip over a floppy in the boot process when it isn't bootable.

      IME, most modern BIOSes do...

  • You always can take floppy image and burn it to CD and make it bootable. But I understand what you mean - as I've seen some manufacturers don't just provide floppy images. They provide some dumb program extracting data directly to floppy. I once owned old IBM ThinkPad which BIOS could be only controlled from Windows application or from crude dos prompt (PS2.EXE). And provided files could only extract directly to floppy. So I had to extract it on other machine, make image and burn it on CD :\ ... It was old
    • You always can take floppy image and burn it to CD and make it bootable

      Even then, lots of BIOS implementations only supported (support?) the floppy drive emulation part of El Torito [wikipedia.org].

      El Torito is probably the only place you'll ever use the BIOS' support for 2.88MB floppies.

  • Why are we still using BIOS's (Score:4, Insightful)

    by QuantumRiff ( 120817 ) on Wednesday June 29, 2005 @06:09PM (#12946108)
    Why are we still using a BIOS on the motherboard patterned after the designs of 20 years ago. None of my computers come with serial, parrellel, or PS2 ports, and no more ISA.. so why are we still using old hacked together BIOS? Sun and Mac have been off of standard BIOS's for years...
    • Because we are still using (on x86) a CPU that, when it powers up, emulates a CPU that was designed 20 years ago. So your peripherals have to have options ROMs that expect an operating environment that is similar to 20 years ago.

      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 enviro
    • Why are we still using a BIOS on the motherboard patterned after the designs of 20 years ago. None of my computers come with serial, parrellel, or PS2 ports, and no more ISA.. so why are we still using old hacked together BIOS?

      Probably because some crufted-over operating system of 20 years ago [microsoft.com] 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 O

      • 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.

    • Sun and Mac have been off of standard BIOS's for years...

      In fact, the last time I updated a bios, I just netbooted the machine. Then again, this was a Sun machine.

  • Wrong Question (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Kris_J ( 10111 ) * on Wednesday June 29, 2005 @07:08PM (#12946543) Homepage Journal
    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.
    • 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.

      Yup - but you can work around it. Check out this [dfi-street.com] thread for more info on not only adding SP2, but all the other NVidia drivers on your CD onl

  • My story (Score:3, Interesting)

    by angle_slam ( 623817 ) on Wednesday June 29, 2005 @07:12PM (#12946566)
    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.

  • When I went to update the BIOS in my Toshiba Satellite, which doesn't even come with a floppy drive, I discovered that since sometime in 2002, Toshiba started supplying bootable .iso images with BIOS updates. So, a quick CD-RW burn later (with the Satellite's DVD/CD-RW drive), I was booting off the CD, and updating BIOS and the CPU's microcode...

    I've yet to try it with my desktop system, but that's a 1999-vintage Tyan.

    (OT: for the love of christ, WTF can't logged-in users post through tor [eff.org]?!)

  • Dell (Score:4, Informative)

    by jb.hl.com ( 782137 ) <joe@joe-ba l d win.net> on Wednesday June 29, 2005 @07:54PM (#12946870) Homepage Journal
    Dell laptops allow you to flash the bios from GRUB (linux bootloader). Not sure how well it works.
  • Many machines allow you to flash with a bootable CD. My Toshiba laptops (3 years old) and ASUS motherboard (1 year old) do. It's usually just a matter of using the bootable floppy image to create the bootable CD. Check with your manufacturer - if it can boot a CD, it will probably work. Usually they just consider the creation of a bootable CD to be too hard for their customers.

  • Next time on "Ask Slashdot".. (Score:3, Informative)

    by mwvdlee ( 775178 ) on Thursday June 30, 2005 @03:15AM (#12948655) Homepage
    "Why do I read Slashdot whilst I obviously know shit about computers?".

    This guy obviously doesn't know anything about what he's doing. Just to sum up some of the other posts'
    - You can use any bootable device, including CD's and network; if it boots, if can flash.
    - Most modern MLB's can be flashed from within Windows.
  • I just add a floppy image to my UBCD. It takes a minute, but it's not hard. Google for Ultimate Boot CD.

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