MSDOS Boot disk with a CD?

[MetalX]

I wanna flash the bios on my 6600gt but I don't have a floppy drive. Anyone to boot DOS with a CD-ROM?

 

[br0adband]

A 9x/ME CD can do that, but then you won't be able to read the NTFS partitions if that's what your Windows machine is using. If you have a FAT32 partition, boot off the 9x/ME CD then cd to that partition where hopefully you stored the BIOS flashing software/tools.

If you don't have a FAT32 partition you not only need to boot off such a CD but then you need to be able to access/read the data on the hard drive, unless you try something like...

Get a simple USB thumb drive, even something as small as a 16MB thumb drive is infinitely superior these days to any floppy drive for no other reason than the things you can do with it. Even if you can't boot off the USB drive, you could boot off the 9x/ME CD, then access the USB drive to run the necessary BIOS flashing software.

Just my $.02.
bb

 

[djnes]

If you get a thumb drive as mentioned above, several free programs exist that will let you format the USB drive to boot to DOS. If you do this, and stick the bios update files on the thumb drive as well, you'll be fine.

 

[alphanumeric]

You could burn a bootable CD using the "floppy disk emulation" option. Then use a windows 98 boot disk for the image. Put the flash file and the bios update file on the remaining space on the CD. There won't be room to put it in the floppy image file, you are limited to 1.44 meg file size. When you boot off of the CD the floppy image file will run just like you had the floppy in the floppy drive and load the cd-rom drivers so you can read the rest of the CD. Then you can change drive letters to the cd-rom and run the bios update from there. You just won't be able to save the current flash file because you can't write to the CD or see your NTFS hard drive. The hard part may be finding the floppy image file. Maybe someone can make one for you and e-mail it to you.

 

[obsolete]

FreeDOS has a bootable cdiso

 

[leeroy]

win98se can boot to dos but then dont install win98 and do wat ya want in dos

 

[Gorankar]

98se boot disk, make a bootable copy of the disk with your bios files and flash utility on the disk..

Another reason it is wise to keep a $10 floppy drive laying around the house.. Even if it is not kept in the comp full time, it's best to have one, for just this sort of thing..