On my so-called dayjob (that more than often ends up keeping me up late at night), I often have to update motherboards’ BIOS data — it happened more than once that USB didn’t really work correctly with some device until the BIOS was updated. I have written about it before and fortunately since then, flashrom started supporting a huge number of motherboards, making it the first choice to update BIOS chips, when they are supported.
Now, when they aren’t, I’m not much of an expert in adding support for them; I have been able to send one patch (which hasn’t been applied still unfortunately) to simply list an extra motherboard, but since most of the boards I have at hand are not mine, too often I cannot go on and try — most of the time I don’t even have the time to do so.
The procedure I have written two and a half years ago would still produce a working bootable USB sticks, but it’s messy; googling around I found an (italian) tutorial (Update (2023-08-19): the previous tutorial was replaced with an English one, and then it was gone. Not even the Wayback Machine has it.) that based itself on installing FreeDOS itself on an USB stick through qemu. And that gave me a very nice idea to solve this cleanly without requiring strange software or dd commands.
For completeness sake, I’d like to add that SysRescueCD’s FreeDOS bootable image seems to crash with invalid instruction errors on almost all the systems I tried it on. No clue as to why.
You need an USB stick of at most 2GB; this ensures that it can be used with FAT16, for maximum compatibility, and the trick will only work properly on systems that can properly boot an USB strick in HDD compatibility mode, which seems to be any system capable of starting off an USB stick at all. In 2GB you can easily add quite a few firmware files, which is something I’m happy with, even if most of the time I don’t need them again after the first time.
For what concerns software, you only need qemu, a copy of FreeDOS (both the Full and Base versions would do), and some good old remembrance of DOS commands). Start up QEmu with the USB stick as the harddrive:
# qemu -hda /dev/sdm -cdrom fdbasecd.iso -boot dThen use FDISK (the DOS variant) to create a single primary partition in the drive. Using the DOS FDISK command ensures that you will have a DOS-compatible partition without having to deal with sizes, alignments, types, and so on.
After re-booting FreeDOS from the CD with the newly-created partition, simply format it, from FreeDOS, and make it bootable:
A:> FORMAT /S C:This copies the minimum required files to boot the disk up, which are well enough to actually update a BIOS. Contrarily to the tutorial I linked above, I don’t have any intention to install FreeDOS, which then would require editing the startup files to disable things. The straight boot is just what I need.
Also, a little funny note here. Today’s box to set up had a MSI motherboard; beside “International” being spelt wrong in the original 1.00 BIOS’s vendor strings, the specs page of the board on MSI’s site states very clearly that “for chipset limitations” neither Windows 98 nor ME can be used on the board… given it’s a Pentium4-era board, that went without saying for me. But on the BIOS update documentation, they still insist on telling you to use a Windows 98 or ME boot disk! Isn’t that lovely?
At any rate, now I have my BIOS update stick, and I’m pretty happy with it. Love FreeDOS.