In fact, we can’t even make bootable floppies natively via our OSes anymore even if we wanted to. Nobody uses floppies anymore and haven’t for years. The 3.5-inch high density floppy format was introduced in 1987. You’d assume by now that no motherboard OEM today would even think of instructing anyone to use a floppy to flash a BIOS with, yet just about all of them do. Why do motherboard OEMs still use a floppy as the primary means of flashing a BIOS? Once the new image is applied, everything is done and you’re prompted to reboot. Being plugged into a UPS prevents that from happening. If you lose power while a BIOS flash is taking place where the unit clicks off, bye-bye computer. Small side note: I do strongly recommend that whenever flashing a BIOS to have your system plugged into a UPS, be it laptop or desktop. While the image is being applied, you’re given this huge nastygram warning to the effect of “!!! DO NOT REBOOT SYSTEM !!!” while the flashing of the BIOS is taking place. The rest of the process is pretty much universal.

And yet others, like the MSI utility, require you to directly type the name of the BIOS image file name with extension on the command line in order to apply it. Others will ask you where the image is, requiring you to navigate with your keyboard up/down keys and locate it that way (which shouldn’t be too difficult). Some BIOS flash utilities will auto-detect where your new BIOS image is and ask if you want to use it or not. BIOS flashing today is basically the same as it’s always been, but the way it’s done differs depending on make of motherboard.

No read errors and the image was applied appropriately.Īdditional side note: It’s also quite nice the Q-Flash utility allows you to backup the existing BIOS image before applying the new one, so if anything screws up, you can always go back to the old one easily. I rebooted, copied the image to a much-newer 4GB Sandisk Cruzer, went back into Q-Flash and everything went through smoothly that time around.

File too large for usb flash drive mac