How to Flash Your BIOS with Flash Drives - The Basics
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The first step involves creating the bootable flash drive. Thankfully, one of the oldest and simplest operating systems -- MS DOS -- is sufficient for flashing any BIOS. So basically we need to create a bootable flash drive with MS DOS.
The previous segment of this series thoroughly explained how to set up a virtual floppy disk drive (VFD) if your system lacks one, to be able to create a blank (virtual) floppy diskette containing the required MS DOS system files along with the boot sector. After that step is done, you will want to grab the MKBT utility, because it is able to extract/install from/to boot sectors to floppies (virtual ones, in our case).
For a more detailed how-to explaining the above steps, please refer back to the previous part of this series called Fundamentals of Flash Drive Booting. Once you have installed the boot sector on your flash drive, then you also need to copy the rest of the system files (io.sys, msdos.sys, and command.com). Surely, you can also grab a ready-to-boot disk image from one of the various websites such as this, this, and this.
However, just for the sake of flashing BIOS, additional items such as optical media support (CD/DVD) are totally unnecessary. But they are definitely useful if you are creating an all-in-one bootable flash drive. And since there is always plenty of space, you may grab a somewhat “complete,” more advanced boot disk image. Follow the instructions closely and install everything on your USB thumb drive.
If you want to follow the route of bootable images, then it’s highly advised that you look into the Windows 98 bootable diskette images instead of the plain MS DOS 6.22 ones. But as always, feel free to experiment, and play around with different bootable variations. What you need to pay attention to is changing the absolute paths to relative ones if there are batch scripts (.bat files) on the pre-included in the image.
Furthermore, it’s time to introduce a new utility that was specifically designed for USB flash drives: HP Drive Key Boot Utility. Don't let the name fool you; it works on all kinds of thumb drives regardless of manufacturer. The utility was developed by HP. It is, in fact, a modified version of the standard disk formatting utility included in Windows, but is specifically designed for USB flash drives.
Once you run it, the utility should automatically detect and select your flash drive. Right after that, you can format the flash drive, and make it bootable as you would with a floppy diskette. This is really helpful because it eliminates the need to create a bootable virtual floppy in order to extract its boot sector, just for the sake of installing it on the flash drive. This utility makes it bootable automatically after formatting.
Be sure to download the necessary bootable system files, as mentioned earlier, for example the Windows 98 one from bootdisk.com, and then you can add these to the HP Drive Key Boot utility.
It should be said that not all flash drives can boot up with FAT32 partitions. The safest approach is to format the USB thumb drive as FAT16. Nevertheless, here comes another problem. Nowadays these flash drives can be very large, such as 16-32GB, 64GB, or even more. Well, the FAT16 partition scheme has a 2GB limitation.
This means that to be absolutely sure that you won’t experience any booting problems due to these limitations, with really large flash drives (over 2GB) it is advised that you divide them into two partitions. You can use fdisk or any other partitioning utility. Split the drive into a less-than-2GB partition, and then the rest. The former section will be FAT16, while the remaining size can be anything.
Moreover, don’t forget that the first partition must be also set as active. The first partition will be the primary active partition as that’s the one which will contain the bootable system files, and to which the boot sector will point. The partition table won’t be altered if you install the MBR afterward without formatting (either with the MKBT tool or by using the “fdisk /mbr” command -- without quotes, of course).
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