JThundley
04-10-2004, 07:41 PM
The other day at work I had to flash an Intel board's BIOS to get it to play nice with the SATA drive. So I go to Intel's site and locate the motherboard (http://developer.intel.com/design/motherbd/rl/rl_bios.htm). Then I download the regular update (ftp://download.intel.com/design/motherbd/rl/RL86510A.86A.0075.P15.IB.EXE).
Well great, it's a friggin' exe! Oh well, let's just extract it!
Let's make a new directory to put it in because this gets a little messy.
mkdir flashbios
mv RL86510A.86A.0075.P15.IB.EXE flashbios/
cd flashbios/
Step 1: unzip RL86510A.86A.0075.P15.IB.EXE
This will print a message and extract all the files. Don't forget to press the any key when it asks.
Step 2: less README.TXT
It's always good to read that... It basically tells you to run the file RUN.BAT but we're too cool for batch files, so let's just read it:
Step 3: less RUN.BAT
The only information in the script that is useful is this:
RAWRITE -f DISK.IMG -d A:
Copy autoexec.bat A:
Copy config.sys A:
Copy err_lev.bat A:
Copy fdxxms.sys A:
Copy findramd.exe A:
Copy tdsk.exe A:
Copy SW.EXE A:
Right away I recognized the RAWRITE command as being the equivalent of dd for Windows. So that means it's time to get a floppy! Get a floppy, and to be safe, format it.
Step 4: fdformat /dev/floppy/0
So now let's write the DISK.IMG to the floppy. I'm not sure what the -f and -d flags do, but being ignorant didn't screw anything up for me.
Step 5: dd if=DISK.IMG of=/dev/floppy/0
So now there are a few files on the floppy. The next thing that the .BAT file would have done is copy all those files to the floppy. First we have to mount the floppy:
Step 6: mount /dev/floppy/0 /mnt/floppy
It wouldn't hurt to see what files are on the floppy, so why not find out: ls -a /mnt/floppy/
The next thing that the batch file would have done is copy all those other files to the disk. So let's do it the easy Linux way now:
Step 6: cp AUTOEXEC.BAT CONFIG.SYS ERR_LEV.BAT FDXXMS.SYS FINDRAMD.EXXE TDSK.EXE SW.EXE /mnt/floppy/
If everything went smoothly, you now have a floppy disk set to reprogram the BIOS!
Step 7: umount /dev/floppy/0
Tell your BIOS to boot from floppy and reboot your machine. If you look carefully when the floppy is being loaded, you'll see that Intel used FreeDOS and some other interesting software. Some of it was beta! It's funny that I'm afraid of them using software at a version of 0.83 to flash a bios, but I'm not afraid of using Linux to make the boot disk when it was clearly intended to be done by a Windows machine.
Well great, it's a friggin' exe! Oh well, let's just extract it!
Let's make a new directory to put it in because this gets a little messy.
mkdir flashbios
mv RL86510A.86A.0075.P15.IB.EXE flashbios/
cd flashbios/
Step 1: unzip RL86510A.86A.0075.P15.IB.EXE
This will print a message and extract all the files. Don't forget to press the any key when it asks.
Step 2: less README.TXT
It's always good to read that... It basically tells you to run the file RUN.BAT but we're too cool for batch files, so let's just read it:
Step 3: less RUN.BAT
The only information in the script that is useful is this:
RAWRITE -f DISK.IMG -d A:
Copy autoexec.bat A:
Copy config.sys A:
Copy err_lev.bat A:
Copy fdxxms.sys A:
Copy findramd.exe A:
Copy tdsk.exe A:
Copy SW.EXE A:
Right away I recognized the RAWRITE command as being the equivalent of dd for Windows. So that means it's time to get a floppy! Get a floppy, and to be safe, format it.
Step 4: fdformat /dev/floppy/0
So now let's write the DISK.IMG to the floppy. I'm not sure what the -f and -d flags do, but being ignorant didn't screw anything up for me.
Step 5: dd if=DISK.IMG of=/dev/floppy/0
So now there are a few files on the floppy. The next thing that the .BAT file would have done is copy all those files to the floppy. First we have to mount the floppy:
Step 6: mount /dev/floppy/0 /mnt/floppy
It wouldn't hurt to see what files are on the floppy, so why not find out: ls -a /mnt/floppy/
The next thing that the batch file would have done is copy all those other files to the disk. So let's do it the easy Linux way now:
Step 6: cp AUTOEXEC.BAT CONFIG.SYS ERR_LEV.BAT FDXXMS.SYS FINDRAMD.EXXE TDSK.EXE SW.EXE /mnt/floppy/
If everything went smoothly, you now have a floppy disk set to reprogram the BIOS!
Step 7: umount /dev/floppy/0
Tell your BIOS to boot from floppy and reboot your machine. If you look carefully when the floppy is being loaded, you'll see that Intel used FreeDOS and some other interesting software. Some of it was beta! It's funny that I'm afraid of them using software at a version of 0.83 to flash a bios, but I'm not afraid of using Linux to make the boot disk when it was clearly intended to be done by a Windows machine.