I am performing a mod to my LGA 775 motherboards that lets me install faster Intel Xeon processors (LGA 771) into a Core 2 Quad motherboard (LGA 775). These 775 boards do not natively support 771 microcode. So the BIOS' have been modified with 771 microcode and now the BIOS of each board needs to be flashed so it will support a 771 CPU. I am aware of the risks and have decided to go forward anyway. I have other PCs, so if this flops, it will be unfortunate, but not crisis inducing. I have the BIOS' I need, ready to go. The only question left on my mind is what is the appropriate boot environment to run the BIOS flashing EXE within? The BIOS update instructions call for boot floppies created from Windows 98 to XP. I can't make those using Windows 10 and I'm trying to figure out what I should be using instead. Any ideas? In case anybody is curious, these are the instructions included with the BIOS. 4. Boot your system from a Win98 or WinME boot-floppy. How to make boot floppy in case your don’t have it ready: For Win9X, You can type [C:\ format a:/s] from the DOS prompt. For WinME, You can make a boot floppy from control panel--> add/remove program-->make boot floppy. Remove autoexec.bat & config.sys file if there's any. For Win2000, there's no way to make boot floppy, so you have to either use Win9X or WinME boot floppy. For WinXP, you can make a DOS boot disk. Go to Your Computer, right click drive A:, select Format, select copy system files. 5. When you get the A:\ prompt, type the following sequence: C: <enter> cd\test <enter> C:\test> adsfi719 BIOS file
You can do that. Download Rufus - software for formatting - it can format USB flash drive bootable for DOS - and then you place BIOS image and flash tool onto that drive, boot from it and start the flash process.
Create a live medium (USB or CD)with Hirens Boot. Same thing, live environment (RAM) with DOS//Windows. You have it easier, from a GUI to copy file, modify hex and run CMD. I used this method for years after I ran outta floppies. So yeah, here is an alternative. Other one could be hardware based - get the SPI chip from the motherboard and flash it with an programmer. The LGA 771 and 775 have socketed SPI bios chip motherboards. Not all, but a vast majority.
This seems simple enough. So just configure it for FreeDOS and I should be good to go? I actually have a Hirens Boot PE x64 handy on a USB stick. Are you suggesting I boot into the GUI and run the command (bios.exe bios.file) from the CMD window there? The quoted text above is a bit confusing to me. I need to be positive I understand what you mean before I try this
Both methods are fine as @mbk1969 pointed out the Rufus way. What I meant was that if you are not comfortable enough in a CLi environment, use Hiren's Boot and Bob's your uncle.
Just download the bios to a clean thumb drive, restart and change your boot device priority to that thumb drive, save and exit.
Well you have to format the drive before you put the bios on it. But that's been the simplest way to update a bios for years. I've never used any extra software.
So you skipped that part in your post... And guy asked in OP how can he format bootable drive for DOS in Windows 10...
@mbk1969 For sure @jbscotchman didnt meant booting from a clean thumb drive without boot parameters, just clean thumb drive, Free-DOS and set to boot.
BTW, when you use some exe-file to flash the BIOS - that`s extra software. Only when you flash right from UEFI BIOS itself you can call it "without extra software".
The BIOS updated successfully. FreeDOS was perfect and everything went according to plan. Now I just need to put the new hardware in to see if my BIOS actually contained the microcode necessary to support this XEON . Thank you for the quick fix mbk1969!
If you update your BIOS directly via regular BIOS/UEFI setup then yes, you need to just save file with new bios on empty thumb stick or floppy, but when you want to flash BIOS using external program(OP mentions exe file), you need bootable media. What he did is basically flash BIOS from OS, but he could not do it from Windows on this board so he did it with bootable FreeDOS.
