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Creating Bootable FreeDOS USB – openSUSE Linux

By ben.kevan on Dec 03, 2009 in Microsoft, openSUSE & SUSE

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/ of=/tmp/mbr.bin bs=512 count=1
Note: In my case /dev/sda was my primary drive

cd /tmp

sudo makebootfat -o /dev/ -E 255 -1 fat12.bin -2 fat16.bin -3 fat32lba.bin -m mbr.bin /tmp/fs-root

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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About the Author

I am ben kevan.. Well yeah. .that's about it.

Comments (6)

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  1. Creating Bootable FreeDOS USB – openSUSE Linux | Ben Kevan's Blog Linux QQ says:
    December 3, 2009 at 8:18 pm

    [...] post:  Creating Bootable FreeDOS USB – openSUSE Linux | Ben Kevan's Blog By admin | category: linux | tags: been-reading, btrfs, code-which, dell, during-normal, [...]

  2. Creating Bootable FreeDOS USB – openSUSE Linux | Ben Kevan's Blog | Just linux！ says:
    December 3, 2009 at 9:42 pm

    [...] View post:  Creating Bootable FreeDOS USB – openSUSE Linux | Ben Kevan's Blog [...]

  3. Robin says:
    December 4, 2009 at 1:01 am

    Have you tried FUK?
    http://lizards.opensuse.org/2008/06/16/firmwareupdatekit/

    Afaik it’s in the main oss repo

  4. Dawid Wróbel says:
    December 4, 2009 at 3:41 am

    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 ;-)

  5. Stefan Brüns says:
    December 4, 2009 at 6:49 am

    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.

  6. Novell News Summary – Part I: OpenSUSE in London, Nürnberg; Infrastructure Repositories Migration | Boycott Novell says:
    December 5, 2009 at 5:28 am

    [...] in the week and it is quite major. Heise covered it and there have been many other technical writings about OpenSUSE, some of which relate to new packages that are updated. OpenSUSE infrastructure [...]

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