# Flash Bios Without A Floppy Drive



## mudvayne37 (Apr 17, 2004)

Is it possible to flash bios without a floppy drive?

The reason I am asking is because my floppy drive died a while back and I have really had no need to replace it considering most of the times I save data to cds now. I have an Intel SE440BX-2 Motherboard and for some reason I am having trouble with Windows reckognizing my 80GB WD hard drive even though it shows up fine in Bios. I have searched all through the forums here and have tried all of the other troubleshooting steps before I noticed that my bios version outdated. Right now I have version 4S4EB2X0.86A.0015.P08. and I am trying to update to 4S4EB2X0.86A.0024.P17. I have a cd burner and software to burn a bootable cd, Im just trying to figure out if this is possible to do this way?

My current IDE configuration is 

Primary Master : CD Burner (Master Jumper)
Second Slave : 80 GB WD (Slave Jumper)
Secondary Master : 10 GB WD (Master Jumper w/ Win98SE OS)
Secondary Slave : 20 GB WD (Slave Jumper)
The only thing not showing up in Windows is the 80 GB WD.

Thank You In Advance For Your Help.


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## cnclathrop (Jan 17, 2004)

yes I have done it before with a cdr. first copy a win98 boot disk to your cdr (make sure it is extracted before writing to cd)from http://www.mirrors.org/archived_software/www.bootdisk.com/original.htm then down load your bios to the same cd in a different directory just remember where you put it . Next turn on your computer enter the bios and make sure boot from cd is selected as first to boot . start computer with cdrom support and then run your flashing software from the cd drive (probably e: in win98 boot disk) EX. e:flash\awardflash k7vta 1623/f and it should load but if the program asks you if you want to save your old bios select no because I dont believe you can write to a cdr in dos mode . hope this helps but in my opinion I dont think that the bios is a problem . when your floppy died did you disable it in your cmos and also did you check your ide driver config to make sure all ide channels are enabled in win 98 ???


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## cavtek (Jul 8, 2004)

yo mudvayne, have you tried going to intels website and downloading the flash to documents and executing it that way. also why would you setup your cd as the primary master...


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## mudvayne37 (Apr 17, 2004)

No i havent tried running it from my documents.. Would that work?

I have had the cd as the primary master for a long time. What would be the best setup?


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## mudvayne37 (Apr 17, 2004)

And yes i disabled the floppy and all settings are right. There was a 10 gb hard drive in its place that worked fine.


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## cavtek (Jul 8, 2004)

i needed to flash the bios on an old modem i installed (i have clunkers) and thats how i did it. the ideal thing would be to boot to A: but i know your floppys out. i would configure an hdd with an os as a primary master and boot to it.


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## mudvayne37 (Apr 17, 2004)

hmmm ... i unpacked the bios .exe to c:\bios and rebooted in ms-dos and ran it and it updated. I would have never figured it would be that easy to flash bios. As for the hard drive showing up, It still isnt there. Im about to try switching them all around. So Prim Master should be my os hd? and Sec Master my CD Burner?


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## cavtek (Jul 8, 2004)

yup and the 80g as the primary slave, then the 20g as the secondary slave. the 80g may still not show up because of its size and you may have to do a DDO (dynamic drive overlay ). some one else will have to help you on that. i dont think thats too hard to do but i dont have the experience to help you on that. good luck. ill check back tonight. but i gotta go to work to pay the bills.


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## DaveBurnett (Nov 11, 2002)

From a security/recovery point of view, you should always use a floppy drive. The reason for this is that there is a seperate bit of BIOS code that will ALWAYS read a floppy even if the rest of the BIOS code is corrupted during a flash. And AMI bios versions don't even need DOS, they work from a floppy with just the BIOS update file.


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## mudvayne37 (Apr 17, 2004)

The crazy thing is the problem ended up being that the drive wasnt partitioned. I never went back into Disk Management after I switched the Ide Connections. I have a new question... Using Windows 2k, Is there a problem with having 2 hard drives partitioned in NTFS and one in FAT32? I have my Primary OS drive and my 10 gb NTFS and my 80 gb full of my backups is Fat32. Will that cause a problem?


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## DaveBurnett (Nov 11, 2002)

No, that will work ok


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## mudvayne37 (Apr 17, 2004)

OK. Thanx alot for all of your help. You can mark this solved now. Once again you guys are awesome.


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