I just upgraded the BIOS on my Intel DG43NB motherboard. What a malarkey! You go to Intel’s website and they’ve helpfully provided a bootable CD ISO for Linux users, so you don’t have to use their Windows utility. Well it turns out the CD isn’t actually bootable, dunno what they’ve done but going back at least five versions it seems its not bootable, so good QA there, plenty of forum posts about it too, so that’s three CD-R’s wasted.

Then there’s the option to just burn the BIO file to a CD or USB stick and press F7 to flash the BIOS, well the F7 support only seems to be in the latest BIOS, so you need the latest BIOS to flash the latest BIOS, good-o Intel!

Eventually I made a bootable USB stick using some freeware BootFlashDos utility which only runs on XP as it needs to copy from system files from the installation (as of course they use a DOS executable to do the flashing, not Linux, so a Linux rescue CD won’t work) and copied the iflash2.exe and nb0090.bio files from the ISO onto it, then ran “iflash2 /pf nb0090.bio” when it booted up.

So now I have an upgraded BIOS, and in future will be able to use the F7 system, but what a crock – if I didn’t happen to have an XP install and spare USB stick around it would have been impossible I think – short of figuring out how to make a DOS boot CD, as FreeDOS didn’t work.