Comments on: firmware without the floppy

By: Jim Perrin

Jim Perrin — Fri, 08 May 2009 12:34:53 +0000

Turns out there’s a nice little script for creating insanely large floppy images if you need them. ‘e_’ from #rhel on freenode was kind enough to point out a syslinux mailing list post from 2004, which outlines building an 8MB (or other size) floppy image. You can find that link here -> http://syslinux.zytor.com/archives/2004-February/003183.html

Thanks e_ for pointing this out.

By: John

John — Sat, 24 Jan 2009 17:05:21 +0000

A problem that has cropped up with this is that some flashutilities, like afudos, and aflash croak when trying to read a romfile from the fake floppy. Tried a few variants and found one aflash or afudos.exe that worked fine. If anyone have any other good suggestions I’d be interested. I guess testing if uniflash works with memdisk could be worthwhile as well.

By: Firmwareupdate ohne Floppy | Gerds Blog

Firmwareupdate ohne Floppy | Gerds Blog — Sun, 28 Dec 2008 19:27:08 +0000

[...] Perrin hat in seinem Blog einen Artikel geschrieben, wie man ein Firmwareupdate ohne Floppy bewerkstelligt. Ich kopiere mir hier mal das [...]

By: Allan

Allan — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 20:34:47 +0000

To be honest, I can’t remember how I created the original 10Mb image (I might have even downloaded a ‘blank’ image from the web somewhere!) But it has Win98SE DOS on it and I just load memdisk with the ‘floppy’ parameter and also ‘c=10 h=64 s=32′.

Then when I need to update the firmware I just extract the contents of the vendor-supplied image/zip file and put it in the 10Mb image – normally a Flash.exe and BIOS update file.

Perhaps your IBM firmware updates may be a little too elaborate/complicated to do this way but it works for my Intel updates.

By: Jim Perrin

Jim Perrin — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 13:32:35 +0000

Are you combining pre-existing floppy images to create your 10MB image? I’m a little interested in doing something similar for some of my ibm firmwares, which are spread across 5-6 floppies.

By: Allan

Allan — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 00:12:35 +0000

Hey thanks for this post. I have used pxelinux and memdisk a lot together but never thought of using memdisk with good ol’ grub. Now it makes updating my server SOOOOOO much easier – I don’t have a floppy drive installed and using a CD seemed a waste. I’ve created a nice big 10 Mb ‘floppy’ image and use that – Intel-based BIOS updates are quite big nowadays!

By: ajay

ajay — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 18:48:51 +0000

What if you don’t have an image? Can you post some instructions on creating a simple DOS boot image to use with memdisk. Actually, I found a blog post that could help with the image stuff:

http://www.terryburton.co.uk/blog/2007/08/pxe-boot-freedos-with-memdisk-to-flash.html

Thanks for the post though, I didn’t know about memdisk!

By: evil_steve

evil_steve — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 06:02:57 +0000

For multiple disks you could try putting them into one “super” image with weird-arse geometry, then tell memdisk about the geometry.

I don’t know of many multi-disk images, but the one or two I’ve seen have a zero-byte file called “disk-1″ or “disk-7″, which is how they know what disk it is, so you could try to fake it with one huge image with all the .img files and all the zerobyte files.

Of course, this could lead to something out of L4d..