Re: Making a Bootable DOS USB Drive to Upgrade BIOS

On Tue, 7 Feb 2012, Luca wrote:

> I see 3 options here:
>
> 1- copy the .exe file to the USB stick: I'm pretty sure you can append your 
> .exe file to the stick

Luca,

   That's what I tried to do, but the file system is iso9660 and read only.

> 2- mount the freedos iso, copy the .exe file on it, make the iso again 
> (mkisofs) and finally dd to the usb stick

   Possible.

> 3- burn the .exe file on a cdrom and use it via freedos (x:\>)

   May be more practical to burn the .iso on a cd, boot that and reference
the .exe on the USB flash drive.

> If you really want to make DOS bootable on your laptop, you have to install 
> freedos on a primary partition (<- to be verified). You should configure lilo 
> to boot on it.

   That's not what I want to do. I want to upgrade the BIOS. Period. Dell has
firmware .hdr files for many other device IDs, but not for mine (0x0429).
I'm calling Dell today to see if they'll provide me with the two .hdr files
instead of the two .exe files. Then I can use dellBiosUpdate-compat to flash
the firmware.

Thanks,

Rich