A step by step guide to making a bootable pen drive usable for flashing bioses can be found here
After many flashes across my Seti farm, I dreaded every bios flash I had to do. First, most are run barebones, headless, no cases, let alone floppy drives. Second, for quite some time I've had to format and install the bios files on the same floppy drive that I am to flash to. Got too many read errors using the floppy on my main box, then using another floppy that I would bring to one of the many blades in my Seti farm, either here or at the warehouse.
Having to get a larger pen drive to shuttle work units to and from the warehouse left me with an extra 128MB pen drive. It occurred to me that I could use it to flash from if I could get it to be bootable.
There I was hung up, did a little searching and asked a couple of people how to get the pen drive to be bootable. Couldn't quite get it done, so I shelved the idea for a bit until I happened to ask MikeC from the Seti forum, while we were idling in the Starfire IRC channel. He came up with a link to a thread in a Dell forum that walked someone all the way through the process. (thanks, Mike!!!)
So here's a simplified version of setting up a drive to be bootable. There are many variations to this procedure, but this is the one I used.
First, get a Windows 98 boot disk. Disconnect your hdd's and any other IDE drives you have for this step. Plug in your pen drive, and boot from the Windows 98 boot disk.
Once booted, your C: drive should be your USB pen drive, since you disconnected your IDE drives. This is important!
Run fdisk from the Windows 98 boot disk, checking to make sure the disk you are modifying is the pen drive. Very easy to mistake a hdd for it, and lose all the data! In fdisk, delete all partitions on the pendrive and create a new one (or several if you prefer).
Once you have your partition made, make it active with fdisk. This is where I was hung up originally, for fdisk will only make the partition in C: drive active! This is the main reason for unplugging all you IDE drives, so your pen drive will show up in DOS as C:. Making the pen drive active is the crucial step in creating a boot disk, without it, it's not a bootable drive.
So now we need some DOS files to run when it boots. Again, there are many options here, this is the method I used. While still in DOS, after you've fdisked the pen drive and made it active, format the drive using the command "format C: /S" That command will format the drive, then place the DOS system files on the drive, making a plain, clean boot disk, no ramdisks or cd drivers, etc.
From there, I took the pen drive to my main rig, dropped the award flash file and the xxxx.bin file I wanted to flash with in the same folder as the DOS system files. Then took it over to the warehouse, plugged it into the blade I wanted to flash, got into bios to change the boot order to USB-HDD first. Restarted, booted into DOS, typed "awdflash.exe xxxxx.bin", and I was off to the races....
So there you have it. I can finally do away with a floppy drive forever. They'll all go in the junk box on the shelves...... hasta lavista....baby!!
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by paul  edited by FastEddie
last modified: 2004-02-07 13:56:43 |
