The majority of motherboard manufactures still only allow you to update your BIOS either from within Windows, from a USB stick within the BIOS itself, or from a floppy with DOS. The first option doesn’t work with a linux box for obvious reasons. While the second option is nice for updating one box, it quickly becomes a hassle when you have an entire rack you need to update. And the third option is antiquated by any meaning of the word… or is it? While the days of floppies are long gone, the reign of the floppy image is still going strong in the world of PXE boot.
The biggest limitation of a floppy image is easily its size. 1.44MB is almost useless in today’s world of terabyte hard drives. Since BIOS images take up about 1MB, that leaves room for not much else. Meaning no scripting, no fancy menus, just the flasher program and your BIOS image. One of the most common methods around this limitation is to offsite your BIOS images to a samba share and instead use the 1.44MBs of space for network utilities. While this does work fine, it brings back bad memories of networking in DOS that I’d rather not experience again. Instead, I’ll walk you through how to expand a floppy image to whatever size is comfy for you, and most importantly, keep it bootable.
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