I want to upgrade the BIOS on an Intel motherboard using a program called iflash2.exe, provided by Intel, which runs only on MS-DOS.
I do not have Windows operating system, and I am trying to create a bootable USB stick that will contain MS-DOS, iflash2.exe, and related files.
I tried a program called UNetbootin, which created a bootable USB with FreeDOS, but I do not know how and where to add iflash2.exe and related files.
Can you tell me how I can do that?
I have used the following technique to flash the BIOS on a HP N54L ProLiant MicroServer. I think it should work for other systems too that just need to run a command from MS-DOS after booting from a USB stick.
I accept no responsibility if this goes wrong. If you don't understand what these instructions do then you probably shouldn't be attempting it.
The following assumes that you have a set of files, or an archive file, that contains the new ROM and a script or executable that applies it. The BIOS might have come with an executable to create a USB from scratch; if you've got this far, you've probably tried running that already and failed. What you need to find are the ROM file and script or executable. In my case, the ROM file was called O41072911.ROM and the script was called FLASH.BAT.
Firstly, you need a USB stick formatted in the most basic way possible. This will erase all data on your USB stick, so back up anything important first!
Plug in your USB stick.
Select the Format... option from the launcher menu:
Select Compatible with all systems (FAT) as the type, give it a sensible name, and click Format:
Then you need to use UNetbootin to make the USB stick boot to an DOS prompt:
sudo apt-get install unetbootin.Run UNetbootin. Select FreeDOS as the distribution and make sure the type is USB Drive and the correct drive is selected. Then click OK:
When UNetbootin has finished, click Exit.
Now you have a USB stick that will boot to DOS.
Now you need to put your BIOS files onto the USB stick. As a general principle, you simply need to copy and paste the files onto the volume.
If they came in a self-extracting .exe file, you need to run it in order to extract the files. To do this, you'll need to:
Install Wine either using the Software Centre or from the command line using sudo apt-get install wine.
Find the .exe file that contains the BIOS files, right click it and run with Wine:
The exact details of what happens next will depend on your BIOS file, but extract the files to a directory somewhere you can remember.
Once you have your files extracted, copy them onto the USB stick. They can go in the root directory of the volume.
Take a look at the files; there is probably a file that contains the new ROM itself, and a .bat or .exe file that is used to apply it. If there's an AUTOEXEC.BAT file, take a look at it and note what command it runs to update the ROM.
Now you're ready to flash your BIOS.
Eject your USB stick from the computer you created it on.
Insert it into the computer you want to flash and reboot.
Boot from the USB stick. You might need to adjust your boot order in the BIOS to achieve this.
You should see the blue FreeDOS boot loader appear with Default highlighted. Either wait 10 seconds or press Enter.
At the FreeDOS menu, select the second option FreeDOS Safe Mode (don't load any drivers):
You will end up at an A:/> prompt. Type C: then Enter to switch to the C drive.
Type dir then Enter and you should see all your files that you copied onto the USB stick.
Run the script or executable that you identified previously as the one to apply the BIOS update. In my case, I just had to type FLASH then Enter to run the FLASH.BAT file.
You should see the flash script applying your BIOS update. Do not power off or interrupt this process; wait until it has finished. It should return you to the C:\> prompt.
You can then remove your USB stick, and power cycle the computer.
Cross you fingers and boot using your new BIOS. Or cry if you just bricked your computer.
I spent all morning struggling to find a way to flash the BIOS on my Zotac motherboard. Unetbootin creates MS-DOS images that will boot, but they cannot find the flash files (awdflash and N0422_ZA.bin in my case) on my USB thumb drive.
What finally worked was creating an Ultimate Boot CD and booting FREEDOS (not MS-DOS) from that CD. Then the USB thumb drive with my flashing files was visible, and the updating of the BIOS worked just fine.
The first thing you should do is check whether you've got a partition table on your flash drive. (i.e. /dev/sdX1, not /dev/sdX in your mount output)
This is actually a big deal because some platforms want one and some don't... to the point where I once ran across a script to create a "universal UDF-formatted USB stick" which had to do some trickery to make the stick simultaneously raw and partitioned because the Windows UDF driver wanted it one way and the macOS UDF driver wanted it the other.
I've got an old thin client I stuck a bigger Disk-on-Module into and repurposed as a retro PC and sometimes need to restore a drive image of when I mess things up and it really shows how particular BIOSes are about this.
It doesn't care whether it's booting the UNetbootin-provided FreeDOS or one of the disk images (eg. "PowerQuest Drive Image 2.0 boot disk") from my PXELINUX-based "Apple Internet Restore for BIOS-based PCs" netboot menu. The BIOS's USB storage device support doesn't care if the USB device being exposed is where the boot image came from. If it's going to work, that makes no difference.
The DOS boot environment does care that the USB stick is formatted with a filesystem it can understand (eg. -F16 option for mkfs.vfat unless the boot disk understands FAT32) and it does require that there be an MS-DOS (not GPT) partition table on the USB stick. (I can confirm that UNetbootin-installed FreeDOS also trips over that, and I assume it's a general "If it's not a floppy disk, it needs a partition table" rule.)
If both of those aren't satisfied, then the USB device's contents won't appear at D:.
I don't know what GNOME's libparted frontend looks like but, on Kubuntu, the simplest solution is to launch "KDE Partition Manager", select the flash drive, choose "Device > New Partition Table", select MS-DOS and click OK, then right-click the unallocated space, choose "New", set "File system" to fat16, click OK, and then click the "Apply all pending operations" checkmark.
That should remove the biggest variable in following the other answers to create a bootable USB stick where the boot image can see the contents of the stick.
(I can confirm that, when UNetbootin is installing FreeDOS, it will just quietly accept the lack of a partition table, trusting that you know what you're doing.)
If your BIOS needs it the other way for some reason, the simplest solution for erasing the partition table and directly formatting the device is probably this, where /dev/sdX is the device node you see in your mount output:
sudo sh -c 'umount /dev/sdX && mkfs.vfat -F16 -I /dev/sdX && eject /dev/sdX'
