Now days no one uses floppies. Well almost no one. I see no legitimate use for them on modern hardware (and OS) except for weird/scary boot and BIOS issues.
I recently tried to boot my 3 year old Gigabyte P35-S3L motherboard off of a USB flash containing Ubuntu 10.10. Unfortunately, the BIOS is not booting from USB Flash. This got me thinking, have I ever upgraded the BIOS? My version is F2, the newest is F8. So I went down that route...
First, you download some XXXX.exe file from Gigabyte's website. Great if you no what to do with such a thing. My Gigabyte motherboard has a Q-Flash utility built into the current BIOS, so I can flash it without booting off any media.
On my notebook:
sudo apt-get install p7zip-full
mkdir bios
mkdir bios
cd bios
mv ../motherboard_bios_ga-p35-s3l_f8.exe .
7z x motherboard_bios_ga-p35-s3l_f8.exels -l
total 1600
-rw-r--r-- 1 scott scott 18 2009-06-21 20:13 autoexec.bat
-rw-r--r-- 1 scott scott 26351 2008-08-28 01:16 FLASHSPI.EXE
-rw-r--r-- 1 scott scott 554366 2010-10-18 13:00 motherboard_bios_ga-p35-s3l_f8.exe
-rw-r--r-- 1 scott scott 1048576 2009-06-19 04:00 P35S3L.F8
At this point, I had the image file P35S3L.F8. It needs to get to my workstation and have Q-Flash work on it. Looking at Q-Flash (hit the End key during boot), it will read floppies and hard drives. (I'm sure only formated FAT) I have no Floppy drive in my workstation, so I found my USB Floppy drive. You are probably thinking, but... it's USB, will the HW do the proper rerouting? I had confidence from prior recovery of BIOS using a USB Floppy.
A little wierd but:
sudo ln -s /dev/sdb /dev/fd0
mformat a:
mcopy P35S3L.F8 a:
(I checked to make sure I could read it and did a diff of the original)Booted into Q-Flash, and now it showed a Floppy B where it only showed Floppy A before. Selected it, chose my image file.. and Click click click... away we go.
I still can't boot off USB Flash, but I do have a new BIOS.
