Bios Upgrade sans floppy?

[MarkDraa]

Now that Dell has joined the "no more floppies" bandwagon, I've started thinking about the real impact of this. The only question I don't have an answer for is:

How does one accomplish a bios upgrade if there is no floppy drive? Let's presume a WinXP-Pro desktop machine.

Recent efforts to make a bootable CD for this purpose have been unsuccessful (maybe Roxio is at fault, but you have to admit the instructions are daunting).

I haven't yet seen the option to "boot from USB" but that might be cool, given the recent popularity of the key-storage devices.

Any and all opinions welcome - Thanks!

M

 

[wolluf]

Have just burnt a bootable CD using Nero (minimal boot, as needed for flashing bios) - just created disk image (used shareware, floppy image, imagine winimage would be ok too) and set Nero to use that as image file. Works fine.

 

[Comtech]

Restart computer, select command prompt with networking, and flash from another computer on the network. :-D
Maybe not an option...
Nero makes it MUCH easier to create a bootable CD, Roxio can go kiss my ***! Anyone that charges for updates to already purchased software...grrrr...[/rant]
It's actually quite safe to boot to DOS mode in XP and do the flash, just make sure there's no autoexec.bat or config.sys in the startup. Cheers,
Jim

http://members.cnx.net/reboot/