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So what is my best course of action? I have no floppy disks on this system, how do I update the BIOS? (Asus motherboard)
Can it be done with a Vista prompt in recovery mode? Do I need to make a bootable DOS USB stick or something?

BTW what happened to F8 upon bootup in Vista for selecting safe mode boot? What is it now?

-Mark

Some Asus motherboards have a flash tool built in to the BIOS that can read the new BIOS from a CD-R. Did you check whether yours has this feature?

It's possible to make a FreeDOS LiveCD. Given that, it should be trivial to add your BIOS update utility to such a beast.

You might find some ideas by looking at the Ultimate Boot CD: http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/

Many motherboards allow you to update the BIOS from CD, USB, and even from within Windows. Check to see which your board can handle.

just brew it! wrote:

Some Asus motherboards have a flash tool built in to the BIOS that can read the new BIOS from a CD-R. Did you check whether yours has this feature?

No, I did not. That would be nice! Always wondered why the BIOS could not be updated within the native OS a little more easily. It isn't rocket science, and external devices like cameras are easy to do right through the USB. I guess they just don't want casual users to make a botch of it easily by forcing a tad of difficulty to keep most of them from doing it unless necessary. I am just used to making a ODS bootable floppy and being done with it, and then found F8 does not work under Vista to get to recovery modes or safe mode (I was going to try cheating).

Most reasonably modern motherboards have a Windows-based utility for flashing the BIOS. I don't necessarily *trust* Windows to not botch the job, but I've done it on many computers (mainly Dells) and it works fine.

Yeah, which moderboard do you have?

With my motherboard, a Asus P5Q3 i can flash either directly from the bios, or from within windows.

If I want to flash from bios, which I think is easier, then I just boot the computer and have any old USB stick attached with the bios file on. From within the bios i then go to the tools menu where i find EZ-Flash 2 and it will read it straight off the USB-stick as long as its fat16/fat32. The motherboard before that i usually used with the asus standard windows bios flasher(ASUS Update), that one can download the newest update directly from Asus without you having to surf into their manual downloads directory.

So my advice is to first look in the bios for Tools menu and EZ-Flash 2, and second, go to the asus driver section for you motherboard and look for Asus Update.

I have this motherboard, the Asus EVO

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6813131402

I love it BTW, easiest setup I have done to date.

You should be able to launch the built-in BIOS flash tool by hitting Alt-F2 during POST.

Yup, sweet! Finally, it is an easy process. Thanks everyone! I was having some peculiar memory issues that was causing stuttering (I think), and it is gone now. My memory was not on the supported list, but it is now.

liquidsquid wrote:

Yup, sweet! Finally, it is an easy process.

With as cheap as flash memory is these days, there's really no excuse for not having a BIOS flash tool integrated onto the motherboard any more. In fact, I'll bet the storage to hold the flash utility adds nothing to the cost of the motherboard, since they're probably using leftover space in the same flash chip that holds the BIOS. Once they've paid for the development of the integrated flash tool, it costs them nothing to include it in future motherboards (other than the time to test it whenever they design a new motherboard). Providing a Windows-based tool is only a partial solution, since there are some people out there who run non-Windows OSes...