BIOS flashing techniques?

[bigbeark]

Last time I flashed a BIOS was about 4 years ago and I used the old school method - A floppy loaded with DOS files and the downloaded BIOS file. I'm a bit hazy on the details now.

Can anyone here refresh my memory on this or suggest a modern method. I had one of those BIOS programming cards that hooked up to a serial port or a USB port but I never got it to work properly and it seems to have been lost in my house moving.

I still have a bunch of floppy drives and cables but I only ever flashed old socket A and 370 chips because I feared bricking the BIOS.

Short of buying a new BIOS chip what do you guys do?

[diif]

Re: BIOS flashing techniques?

It all depends on what needs updating but generally if it's dead I remove it from the board to program. If it's on a working device, it all depends on how the BIOS update is provided as to how it's programmed, some update from Windows executable some USB.

[stj]

Re: BIOS flashing techniques?

you can use a program called Rufus to create a bootable dos usb stick.
then use it just like you used a floppy disk

[Dan81]

Re: BIOS flashing techniques?

If the board allows physically removing the chip (aka PLCC/DIP socket), then simple. I crank out another board, a 8GB WDC with a 98SE install on which I copy the BIOS file, and then boot to DOS. I use Uniflash 1.40 most of the times, except on newer boards (P4 and up usually) where I use the DOS variant of flashrom.