BIOS Flash Q&A White Paper

1. Insert a blank, floppy diskette into the PC.
2. From Windows Explorer, right-click the 3 1/2 Floppy (A:) drive and choose
Format. The Format 3 1/2 Floppy (A:) window appears.
3. In the Format Options section, select Create an MS-DOS startup disk. To format
the disk, choose Start.
If Windows XP is not accessible, a bootable diskette can be created using FreeDOS
(http://www.freedos.org/). FreeDOS is available as an ISO image and as a
diskette distribution in 1.44MB format. For your convenience, a 1.44MB boot disk
image is also available.
After the disk is formatted with either method, additional steps are required to
prepare the diskette (see Appendix A) before copying the contents of the DOS
Flash directory (i.e. Flashbin.exe, Assignpw.exe, and BIOS image file
(XXX_MMmm.bin)) to the media. Assignpw.exe is required if PC to be updated has
administrator/setup password set.
What are the steps necessary to create a bootable CD for
BIOS update?
A bootable, El-Torito compatible, CD can be created for BIOS update. Most third
party CD burning software supports the creation of a bootable CD emulating a
floppy, and a subset of those also support the creation of a bootable CD emulating
a hard disk. The BIOS image of some products are too large to fit on a diskette.
For these platforms, the ISO image must be made from a bootable hard drive
image. This is most easily done using bootable USB flash media (e.g. DOK) as the
image source. To conserve space, ensure the partition is just large enough to hold
the BIOS image. For BIOS images that can fit on a floppy diskette, bootable CD
with floppy emulation would require the user to create a bootable floppy diskette
such as in the manner described in the previous question. The third party CD
software can create an image from the floppy and transfer this to the CD. Once
the CD burning process is complete, the business PC can be booted from the CD,
and the Flashbin utility can be executed.
If the adminstrator/setup password has been established on the business PC, the
Flashbin utility driver must be assigned the password. Assign Password
(Assignpw.exe) can be used with DOS Flash if an administrative/setup password
has been previously set on the target PC. To assign a password to DOS Flash,
change directories to the directory that contains Flashbin.exe and type "assignpw
flsh.cpu". This procedure should be executed on the floppy diskette files before
creating the CD media.
What are the steps necessary to create the BIOS image CD
for F10 ROM flash and recovery?
The softpaq BIOS CD Image file (XXX_MMmm.iso) allows the user or administrator
to create binary image CD that can be used to locally restore or update the system
BIOS. This feature requires that a system is available with CD burning software
and a compatible CD-R/RW drive installed.