During building my current home PC I decided to get rid of FDD and disabled it in BIOS, did not connect cable and power into drive (which is still in computer case due my laziness). But how to upgrade BIOS without floppy?
There are some solutions:
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Create floppy image and burn it to CD
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Create floppy image and use MEMDISK
Where to get floppy image? Good one is FreeDOS fdboot.img — mount it via loop, remove directories, put flasher and bios image, umount. Then time for another step.
If you want to go CD way, you need to start CD writing program (I used K3b) and use you floppy image as bootable image. No need for any other files — you only flash 1.4M. Then boot computer from CD, select ‘Safe Mode’ in FreeDOS and run flasher.
Memdisk way is a bit simpler. You need to download syslinux package from your distro or built it (I used Debian package). Then you have to find memdisk binary (/usr/share/syslinux/ in Debian) and copy it to /boot/. Then copy floppy image into same directory. Next step is configuration of boot loader (I use GRUB). Add new entry with memdisk as kernel and floppy image as initrd. Then reboot, selecting proper entry from list and select ‘Safe Mode’ in FreeDOS and run flasher.
Small modification of second step can be skip of configuration editing and usage of GRUB shell to do same.
I hope that someone will find that howto useful.
UPDATE: in some places I found informations that memdisk is not good way to reflash BIOS — some flashers refuse to work or breaks.