# How to I flash Toshiba bios on a laptop with no floppy/CD-ROM drive?



## diablo75 (Sep 7, 2006)

I have an old Toshiba Portege 7140CT and I need to upgrade the BIOS to get rid of an ACPI compatibility issue. The laptop only has one USB port on it, and no floppy drive or CD-ROM drive. I do not have an external USB floppy drive handy. Is there another way to update the BIOS on this laptop without a floppy?


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## tacoman359 (Jul 26, 2007)

Can you boot from USB? If not, you'll have to modify the boot loader or do something similar to that so you can tell the computer to boot to a different location. Make sure you set it up so there are two options, one to boot Windows and the other to flash the BIOS. If you forget to put an option to boot into Windows it will be extremely hard to change it back unless you have a recovery console partition or anything like that on your computer.


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## horsecharles (Jul 24, 2005)

Is it safe to assume you can't surf the web with it? Are you running win98?

If you're willing to spend $25-35--

1. Mr.Bios will send you a flashed bios. OR:

2. Pricegrabber will yield you an external floppy drive...


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## tacoman359 (Jul 26, 2007)

I'm pretty sure Mr. BIOS cannot just send you the newest BIOS and have it automatically installed onto your computer. That's basically impossible. They probably just sell you the file, which you can probably find online, and you have to extract it to a disk. Also, will booting from a USB floppy drive work if his computer doesn't support USB booting? If the computer does support USB booting, then there is no need to buy an external floppy drive when he can just plug a USB drive in, and if it doesn't support it, I'm pretty sure the system will not recognize it as an internal floppy drive, if it recognizes it at all.


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## diablo75 (Sep 7, 2006)

I've asked the client to purchase a floppy drive for the laptop from ebay for about $17. That should do the trick. The laptop is currently running Windows 2000, but we have full intentions of wiping the drive and starting with a fresh install of Xubuntu Linux.


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## horsecharles (Jul 24, 2005)

tacoman359 said:


> I'm pretty sure Mr. BIOS cannot just send you the newest BIOS and have it automatically installed onto your computer. That's basically impossible. They probably just sell you the file, which you can probably find online, and you have to extract it to a disk. Also, will booting from a USB floppy drive work if his computer doesn't support USB booting? If the computer does support USB booting, then there is no need to buy an external floppy drive when he can just plug a USB drive in, and if it doesn't support it, I'm pretty sure the system will not recognize it as an internal floppy drive, if it recognizes it at all.


They send it on chip, you swap out one for the other-- what's so hard about that?

If you wanted to get difficult, the present chip 'might be able' to be inserted into another computer, flashed there, put back in place.


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## tacoman359 (Jul 26, 2007)

I had no idea that BIOS chips could be replaced without replacing the whole motherboard.


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## horsecharles (Jul 24, 2005)

tacoman359 said:


> I had no idea that BIOS chips could be replaced without replacing the whole motherboard.


That's a very good point-- some chips are soldered on...but even then, they can be detached-- if feeling adventurous 

Peace.


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