Flash your (Award) BIOS with Linux - HowFlow

Most Recent | 24 hours | 7 days | 30 days | 365 days |

6
Vote

Category: Linux | Tags: linux bios award freedos awdflash comments

HowFlow — Even in our modern times, most of the motherboard and BIOS vendors are only supplying .EXE files to flash the BIOS. This trick shows you how to upgrade your BIOS with Linux. All you need is a blank CDR, a FreeDOS image and some tools.

Posted by

aroedl 3 months ago

Step by step instructions

Create a working directory:


mkdir biosupdate && cd biosupdate

Download the latest BIOS image from your vendors site and put it into the newly created biosupdate directory.

The Award BIOS is used on a lot of motherboards, but please check twice if this is the case on your machine.


wget ftp://ftp.shuttle.com/BIOS/utility/awdflash.zip

Download the FreeDOS boot image:


wget http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/distributions/1.0/fdboot.img

Now we create a directoy to loop mount the FreeDOS boot image, remove one unnecessary file and copy the flash utility and the BIOS image into that directory. Then we unmount the image and delete the temporary directory. The result is a new boot image:


mkdir tmp
mount -t vfat -o loop fdboot.img tmp
rm tmp/fdconfig.sys
cp awdflash.EXE <YOUR_BIOS_IMAGE> tmp   # Replace <YOUR_BIOS_IMAGE> with whatever file you downloaded in the very first step
umount tmp
rm -r tmp

Now we have to create an ISO image:


mkdir isoimage
cp fdboot.img isoimage
mkisofs -r -b fdboot.img -c boot.cat -o biosupdate.iso isoimage

If your system is configured correctly, you can burn the image with the following command to a blank CD:


cdrecord biosupdate.iso

Boot the CD and if all went well, you can enter awdflash on the DOS command prompt. Just follow the AWDFlash instructions.

For more Linux tricks click here

Please log in or sign up and vote for this trick if it was helpful for you.
Don't forget to subscribe to our

RSS/Atom feed to get the latest tricks.