Creating Bootable FreeDOS USB – openSUSE Linux
I’ve been reading a story about the Dell Latitude E6500 BIOS and possible over throttling during normal operating conditions, and decided to upgrade my BIOS. Although this task for windows users is pretty straight forward (you download the .EXE binary, and run it). However, with Linux we don’t run the .EXE binary natively.
So our option is to create a FreeDOS Bootable USB, to boot to and install the required BIOS update.
First download the update for your computer.
Do the following:
mkdir -p /tmp/fs-root
Download to tmp and tmp/fs-root:
wget --directory-prefix=/tmp/fs-root http://www.benkevan.com/upload/freedosboot/command.com
wget --directory-prefix=/tmp/fs-root http://www.benkevan.com/upload/freedosboot/kernel.sys
wget --directory-prefix=/tmp http://www.benkevan.com/upload/freedosboot/fat12.bin
wget --directory-prefix=/tmp http://www.benkevan.com/upload/freedosboot/fat16.bin
wget --directory-prefix=/tmp http://www.benkevan.com/upload/freedosboot/fat32lba.bin
These were grabbed from www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/distributions/1.0/pkgs/ required packages (kernel.zip, commandx.zip unstablx.zip)
Install makefakeboot if you don't have it:
sudo zypper in makebootfat
sudo dd if=/dev/
Note: In my case /dev/sda was my primary drive
cd /tmp
sudo makebootfat -o /dev/
Now since I needed to update my BIOS, I then copied the bios.exe over to the thumb drive, rebooted my machine and booted to the USB stick (note, your have to verify your BIOS supports booting to USB before this works for you).
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3 Comments
Have you tried FUK?
http://lizards.opensuse.org/2008/06/16/firmwareupdatekit/
Afaik it’s in the main oss repo
I’m quite sure Dell provides BIOS updating tools for linux (http://linux.dell.com/projects.shtml), so I guess your solution is a bit of an overkill
Well, if you have a Dell computer, its much simpler. Just download the BIOSdisk rpm from linux.dell.com, execute “biosdisk –install “, and select the right entry from your grub menu on next reboot. Works even if booting from usb is not supported.
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