Paul Codding's Weblog » Uncategorized http://www.paulcodding.com/blog My miscellaneous ramblings and how-to's Sat, 17 Jul 2010 02:59:34 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.4 Update a BIOS lately? http://www.paulcodding.com/blog/2008/10/12/update-a-bios-lately/ http://www.paulcodding.com/blog/2008/10/12/update-a-bios-lately/#comments Mon, 13 Oct 2008 02:22:25 +0000 Paul Codding http://www.paulcodding.com/blog/?p=34 So, I’ve spent the past 2 hours attempting to update the BIOS on my Dell SC420 server in hopes of running ESXi. This *should* be an easy task, but if you find yourself without a floppy drive and a Windows system you are in for a 2 hour adventure. 

My first thought was to boot the server from a pen/flash/usb drive. At first glance I thought I could simply use the linux biosdisk utility from Dell available here.  The options are to create a disk image, write directly to a floppy drive, or create an RPM. I attempted using the first two options and made significant use of dd and fdisk without any luck. 

I’m wondering why it is so difficult to do this.  After Google’ing for hours, I found no good solution.  If anyone has a good idea on how to do this, I am all ears.  I am currently downloading a Fedora Core 7 Virtual Appliance so I can use revisor as mentioned here.

The question I have is how in the world do people update their BIOS’s if they do not run Windows on their server, and do not have access to a Windows machine or a floppy drive??

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