flashing BIOS from non boot disk?

[ticul]

Hello and thanks for reading.

I have an hp pavilion zt1170 and there is a bug in the BIOS which won't let it boot from CDs recorded with the El Torito standard. An update for the BIOS fixes this (BIOS version 1.1 on the hp website), however there is no floppy drive to boot from! I tried making a bootable CD from the IMG in Nero on another PC, but it won't boot on the laptop because of the problem with the BIOS.

The HDD is corrupt and I need to reformat, which is why I need to update the BIOS to boot from a WinXP CD and do a clean install. The only kind of CD the laptop boots from seems to be Win98 CDs...

the solution would appear to be : boot from a win98 CD, go to command prompt with CD support, insert a second CD with the flash.exe program and flash from there. but that would skip all the batch files that run a bunch of checks before updating the BIOS, and well I'm not sure you can flash the BIOS from a disk that's not your boot disk...

any help would be greatly appreciated !

[Alanoll]

What you could do....

is make a nonstandard El Torrito boot CD. Basically,

1. Find a computer with an A: drive, and create the disc using the BIOS Update software (asks for a disc right?)

2. Create a floppy image (WinIMage would work) and save it as an uncompressed IMG file.

3. Using CDIMAGE to create a CD (just use a text file for the CD contents) but specify the floppy image as your boot sector.

4. Burn the CD, and try and see if that works.

NOTE: If this doesn't work, (IE system disc error upon booting) it means the floppy image wasn't bootable. So instead, depending on size, make a bootable floppy and copy the files into the floppy, then create the image and continue with the process, or

1. Use a standard Windows 98 boot disc with CD support and just copy the contents of your flash floppy to a folder, and use the 98 boot disc as the boot sector and the flash floppy as the CD contents. Most likely, there is a bat file somewhere to jump start the process. Just execte that file when the CD boots.

[ticul]

Thank you so much!!!

I couln't boot from the CD created from the floppy image, but when I used the boot sector from the Win98 CD it worked. I had to modify the batch files a bit, (a: to d: for the most part, and set config=english), but besides that it worked like a charm and now I can boot from my WinXP CD.

[edmoncu]

also if the bios it uses is award-based. you can use winflash to flash under winxp. i believe there's a separate tool for ami-based bioses as well that does the same.