Recently I had to update the firmware in my ASRock ALiveDual-eSATA2 mainboard. ASRocks only has Windows and DOS Installers. Having neither I came to the following solution to flash the BIOS:
Summary: read this tutorial on how to rebuild a FreeDos Boot CDROM. This just has to be modified a bit.
Step 1: Get a Boot CD from http://www.freedos.org/freedos/files (the small basecd.iso worked for me).
Step 2: Mount the image: mount -o loop fdfullws.iso /mnt/misc
Step 3: Create a directory for the new CD: mkdir ./modified_basecd
Step 4: Copy the content of the mounted image to the created directory: cp -ax /mnt/misc/* ./modified_basecd/
- Step 5: Download the DOS Firmware Update from the manufacturer
Step 6: Copy the file to modified_basecd
Step 7: Create an iso file: mkisofs -R -D -V "FreeDOS 1.0" -o freedos.iso -b isolinux/isolinux.bin -c isolinux/boot.cat -no-emul-boot -boot-load-size 4 -boot-info-table ./modified_basecd
- Step 8: Check the created in virtualbox or similar.
- Step 9: If it works, burn it and reboot from the created CD.
- Step 10: At the FreeDOS boot prompt just press enter.
- Step 11: In the next menu choose "1. prepare for Setup"
- Step 12: Now choose your preferred Language
- Step 13: Now choose "Run Freedos from CD-ROM (return to command prompt)" - this exits the Setup script.
- Step 14: At the command prompt you can now type the name of the file you copied at Step 6 (hint: FreeDOS has tab completion).
That's it