I'm amazed this is so difficult but I've just spent 3 hours trying to update the BIOS on my Dell XPS 13 and hit nothing but dead ends. The root of the problem seems to be that the 4MB BIOS update file is too large for the available 1.44MB DOS boot disks. Apparently FreeDOS had a LiveCD available at some point but it has reportedly been unavailable for quite some time.
The following method looks promising but it also doesn't work. DOS can't seem to execute the .exe file which sits outside of the boot image: http://en.gentoo-wiki.com/wiki/FreeDOS_Flash_Drive Does anyone know how to do this? - Grant