Flashing BIOS w/o a floppy drive

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ev0l

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i've been trying to update my bios due to a problem i've been having with a video game. the game points to a vague memory problem, though it could be many other things. the memory is brand new, but i've heard of unstability in the combo that i have. nforce 2 mobo and ddr400 i gig stick.

i'm hoping an updated BIOS would help with this, but i have no floppy drive except and external superdisk drive which for the life of me i can't get the thing to make a bootable disk. I simply warns me that formattng the disk will erase all the data, click ok or cancel. when i click ok nothing happens. otherwise the drive works fine.

i've been toying around with a bootable cd, however the only way i've gotten it to work was using that fixntldr.iso file you can download. however i can't seem to get to a prompt with it, which i need to do inorder to reach the folder that holds my update. all i get are 10 options to boot which leads me right back into windows. the discs i've made w/ magiciso using the three system files from the windows drive never get noticed.

any advice would be appreciated. i know its gonna make me look stupid though. : (
 
Just create a floppy emulation bootable CD using your favourite CD burning program. When it asks for a floppy image file, point it to the Win98SE one from www.bootdisk.com (get the non-Windows version (not .exe)). Unzip it of course :)

Drag and drop the BIOS flashing stuff to the CD compilation. Burn and boot. The CD will boot up using floppy emulation, the CD itself will get a drive letter like T: or R: (you are told which one it is).


You can also use any other media with a FAT filesystem, including USB external hard drives or flash disks. You'd have to use the FreeDOS boot from UBCD (www.ultimatebootcd.com) to get USB support though.
 
Nodsu suggestion would most likley be the cheapest way, but when I built my new comptuer I didn't put a floppy in there either and then noticed from time to time that I might need one. So I just got an USB floppy drive. Then I can just plug it on my comptuer when need it and I have floppy drive that I can use for a new laptop that I am thinking about getting since laptops don't really come with the floppy anymore.

Cost you about $30. At least that is what I paid for mine.
 
USB floppies are not the same as regular floppies. You MUST use a regular floppy for BIOS and core updates.
 
Uhm.. Why?

The BIOS flasher is just a DOS program and I've run these things off CDs, USB flash drives, hard drives and RAM drives no problem..

Of course, if you have some flashy DOS environment that loads half a dozen of weird resident programs, you may run into some trouble, but a program is a program and a well-written DOS program certainly doesn't care what sort of media it is run off from.
 
Tedster said:
USB floppies are not the same as regular floppies. You MUST use a regular floppy for BIOS and core updates.
Not really true I wa able to flash mine with out a standard Floppy drive. It does depent on the Chipset brand of Bios you are running. I have seen some that it won't work on because the system doesn't reconize the USB floppy until after Windows has started.
 
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