Hi,
N.B. Keep in mind that traditional BIOS (CSM) is going away entirely
in favor of UEFI. So, in future, you'll never have this problem again!
On Sat, Apr 7, 2018 at 7:54 AM, Kevin McCormick <kev4...@fastmail.fm> wrote:
>
> I omitted to say that my operating system is Linux, Slackware 14.2. The
> Windows solutions of Rufus or a dos formatted usb stick don't work for me
> since these require some form of Windows. Unetbootin also does not work
> with FreeDOS I.2, but even with a 1.0 image, the usb stick goes into the
> setup routine.
There was a writeup on one guy's blog about FD 1.1 under Linux
("FreeDOS 1.1 Bootable USB Image"), see here:
http://joelinoff.com/blog/?p=431
> I am now looking at:
> https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Flashing_BIOS_from_Linux
> and
> https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/BIOS_Update#FreeDOS_environment
I'm no expert, but here's some more links:
* https://wiki.debian.org/FlashBIOS
* https://wiki.debian.org/DualBoot/FreeDOS
*
https://www.dell.com/support/article/us/en/19/sln171755/updating-the-dell-bios-in-linux-and-ubuntu-environments?lang=en#Creating%20a%20USB%20Bootable%20Storage%20Device
> I have created several bootable usb sticks with syslinux and FreeDOS, but
> they enter the FreeDOS Setup menu when they are booted.
Perhaps you want (Perl-based) sys-freedos-linux?
https://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/dos/sys/sys-freedos-linux/sys-freedos-linux.zip
> I believe I want just the COMMAND.COM, IO.SYS, and a few other files to have
> the DOS
> functionality that will be needed for the bios update .EXE file.
MSDOS.SYS + IO.SYS = KERNEL.SYS (at least, in FreeDOS)
Bare bones would be shell, kernel, config files, and possibly other
things (e.g. XMS memory manager, keyboard or mouse drivers, etc).
*
https://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/distributions/unofficial/metados/
> I imagine the .EXE has the bios rom image included, so some compression
> software is probably needed.
I don't understand what you mean here. I doubt you need any
compression software for this, but I too don't reflash BIOSes a lot.
> The MSI bios upgrade process is in the initial boot, where you are supposed
> to press DEL to enter bios setup and then select something like M-FLASH or
> FLASH BIOS which then asks you to select a file from the USB stick. At this
> point the upgrade process stops with a message like unusable file or missing
> files or something which I don't remember exactly.
What file system are you using? Maybe it only recognizes certain ones?
FAT16? FAT32? Dunno.
Part of the problem with pre-made images is differently-sized disks.
In theory, I could make you a minimal 64 MB .img from a bootable
FreeDOS jump drive (which would .ZIP to less than 1 MB). You could
then low-level copy it onto larger drives, but it would only see 64 MB
of space (presumably plenty for BIOS data??).
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