Possible to update Bios without Floppy?

[aetherh4cker]

So I was reading the Abit Bios Update Guide and it clearly shows how to update the Bios with a floppy. I was wondering if it's possible to do it without a floppy drive?

I did manage to force it to format my USB flash drive with the "Create an MS-DOS startup disk" option, but it formatted it down to 1.44MB in size, and with the files that were automatically put on, there isn't room to put on the Bios update software.

Here is a list of the files it put on:
DISPLAY.SYS
EGA.CPI
EGA2.CPI
EGA3.CPI
KEYB.BAT
KEYBOARD.SYS
KEYBRD2.SYS
KEYBRD3.SYS
KEYBRD4.SYS
MODE.BAT

This equals to 555KB used already, leaving me with only 868KB free. It seems I need about 1100KB free to fit the Bios update software on there, and that's assuming it will even boot from the USB flash drive.

So I'm really looking for some sort of alternative here, thanks!

 

[EricB]

what the mobo's name?

I had a similar issue with my gigabyte board last night. I had upgrade my processor to an amd anthlon fx 6000 and the mobo would not recognize it. gigabyte instruction said copy the files to a win 98 floppy. the files wouldn't fit on it. I copied it to a xp startup floppy and it worked

try format the floppy copy all of the files to the usb drive, then try adding the files .

 

[aetherh4cker]

I have the Abit IP35.

... and I don't fully understand your post. What exactly do you want me to do...? Keep in mind, I have no floppy drive at all.

 

[atomic tofu]

what is the size of your flash drive
I believe your size limit is only assumed...meaning those files you have now you can copy...then format the flash drive normally, freeing up whatever it actually has...then copy back those boot files and the bios image.

I am assuming the above would work, but not sure.

then you have to make sure the biot device is boot capable as well as your mobo having usb boot ability

 

[aetherh4cker]

The motherboard *said* could boot from USB, but it turns out my current bios version was bugged and wouldn't boot from USB.

What I ended up doing is using Ultra ISO to take an image of a bootable floppy disk and adding my bios update files to the image. Then with Nero I was able to burn the floppy disk image to a cd-r.

I was a little nervous, because if it wanted to write to the cd-r for some reason while updating the bios, it wouldn't be able to... but all went well.

I'm now running on the latest bios and my double boot issue is fixed.

 

[EricB]

I had just got back from my daugther basketball game. I had used nero burning rom to make a bootable cd.

oh well,
I see you don't need it now