Flashing Dell BIOS from Linux

September 8, 2004 Posted by mitch | linux, technology | 0 Comments

Well, I've been having a hard time finding anything decent from Dells Linux forums... currently all they have is this biosdisk which is somewhat cryptic unless you want to look through the source code, it doesn't tell you what its doing behind the scenes. However, last time I was looking it up. I found this information which referred to an older version of the biosdisk. However using the latest 0.50 as of this writing.

Download this RPM http://linux.dell.com/biosdisk/biosdisk-0.50-1.noarch.rpm

Run: biosdisk mkpkg /home/mitch/GX270A04.EXE (as root [su -]) *note: path and file name may be different, this is the version I was using however.

This gave me this error: "Error! There was a problem creating your rpm."

However... it still worked. (it droped an image file in /boot called dosdisk.img, if this didn't happen for you... don't know what to tell you...)

Then, you need to copy the memdisk file from /usr/lib/syslinux (this is redhat specific your milage may vary)

"cp /usr/lib/syslinux/memdisk /boot"

Then edit /boot/grub/grub.conf like so, adding the fallowing lines:

title Dell BIOS flash
root (hd0,0)
kernel /memdisk
initrd /dosdisk.img

Once again, change as needed for your system.

Save grub.conf and exit.

Reboot, and fallow Dells normal instructions for flashing the bios (you will have to select the correct boot option from grub on boot to flash the bios... and hopefully you didn't put it as the default)

Update: I suspect it is failing for me because of missing dependancies... I will find them and update this when I do.