Need a bootable CD to upgrade BIOS

darael · 25 Mar 2013 at 17:05

I have a PC which does not have BIOS support for USB booting. But the BIOS version is quite old, and I want to update it anyway - I realise this is unlikely to provide USB support, but want to update the BIOS regardless.

I have downloaded an ISO image for DOS 6.22. I tried UltraISO and MagicISO to edit to the image to add files needed to flash the BIOS. However the added folder does not show when the CD is booted. The ISO image does grow in size, making me wonder where the files have gone!

So perhaps there is some CD with NTFS support that I can download and boot from and gives me access to the BIOS files on the harddrive which is NTFS?

Help!

shankly1985 · 25 Mar 2013 at 17:36

On your motherboards site you should be able to download the bios update? Is the file not already iso format just use imgburn. What's your motherboard model number?

darael · 25 Mar 2013 at 18:00

shankly1985 said:
On your motherboards site you should be able to download the bios update? Is the file not already iso format just use imgburn. What's your motherboard model number?

I've never ever seen a BIOS in an ISO format. But the BIOS update is a ZIP file, which contains the flash program and flash image.

I have, only just recently, managed to flash the BIOS using this method: http://www.bay-wolf.com/bootcd-bios.htm

CaptainCrash · 25 Mar 2013 at 23:55

I wonder if the DOS 6.22 image you downloaded is loading a DOS mode driver that's incompatible with your particular optical drive... I seem to remember you can boot from a CD created from a DOS floppy image, but unless a working driver and mscdex.exe are also loaded (from config.sys and autoexec.bat respectively), it won't recognise its own filesystem, so you can't do much with it.

You could give this a try (bootable DOS 7 CD), just insert your BIOS files with UltraISO as you did before. It might also be an idea to extract the BIOS files from the zip into the root of the drive, rather than into a subfolder.

edit: I guess you could also find Hiren's Boot CD on the web (Google is your friend) and run the BIOS update directly from the hard drive, but I've never flashed a BIOS this way so can't guarantee your computer won't blow up (suggest you open a command prompt window to run the executable rather than double-clicking it in Explorer).

edit 2: whoops, I somehow missed the bit where you said you'd managed to flash the BIOS, so ignore all of the above...