From Initq

We bought some MSI motherboards and with it we bought AMD Phenom II X6 1090T Processors. Well these processors just came out and the MB was not recognizing them properly. It would say AMD unknown processor. We went to the MSI site and saw that we were way behind in firmware upgrades. We downloaded the two upgrades we needed and both firmware readme files instructed us to boot up with a windows 98 floppy and then run the firmware upgrade. We don't have any of that so here is what we did:

Get FreeDOS boot disk image

FreeDOS, a free DOS-compatible operating system, is up to the challenge, no need for proprietary DOS versions. So, all you need is a bootable floppy disk image with FreeDOS kernel on it. We are fortunate that guys at FDOS site have prepared one suitable for us. Use the OEM Bootdisk version, the one with just kernel and command.com, because it leaves more free space on disk for the flash utility and new BIOS image. You can also find a local copy of this image attached at the end of this article. After you download the image, you need to decompress it. In other words:

wget http://www.fdos.org/bootdisks/autogen/FDOEM.144.gz
gunzip FDOEM.144.gz

Copy your BIOS flash utility and new BIOS image to the mounted floppy disk image

Requirement for this step is that you have support for the vfat and loop file systems in the kernel. Or you can have those features compiled as modules. In the latter case, load the modules before the next step, like this.

modprobe vfat
modprobe loop

Consult /proc/fileystems to see if you have the needed file systems supported. If you do, you should be able to "loop mount" the floppy disk image to some temporary path:

mkdir /tmp/floppy
mount -t vfat -o loop FDOEM.144 /tmp/floppy

If the mount went without errors, copy BIOS flash utility and new BIOS image to the mounted floppy disk image. You'll probably have to unzip the archive you downloaded from your motherboard vendor site, to get to those two files. Here's just an example for my motherboard (in your case, files will have different names, of course):

# unzip 775Dual-VSTA\(2.60\).zip
Archive: 775Dual-VSTA(2.60).zip
  inflating: 75DVSTA2.60
  inflating: ASRflash.exe
# cp 75DVSTA2.60 ASRflash.exe /tmp/floppy

Doublecheck that everything went OK, that those two files weren't too big for the floppy:

Filesystem           1K-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
/tmp/FDOEM.144
                          1424       990       434  70% /tmp/floppy

Finally, unmount the floppy disk image:

umount /tmp/floppy

Burn a bootable CD which will emulate floppy device for us

Next step is to burn the floppy image to a CD/DVD-RW media, but in a way that it can be booted afterwards. First we need to make a bootable CD image, and then burn it. Notice that on some modern distributions, cdrecord is renamed to wodim, and mkisofs to genisoimage, but the parameters below should be the same.

mkisofs -o bootcd.iso -b FDOEM.144 FDOEM.144
cdrecord -v bootcd.iso

Reboot, flash, reboot, enjoy your new BIOS

Finally reboot your machine, make sure that your CD drive is first in the boot sequence, and then run your BIOS upgrade procedure when the CD boots.

Extra Notes

We updated the bios on MSI 790FX-GD70 but when we got to 890FXA-GD70 we realized that the bios was larger than 1.44 Meg. so in that situation you can put that on a flash drive. When we stuck the flash stick on the computer and went into the BIOS we saw that there was an option right there to upgrade from the flash drive. We found that to be most convenient. I recommend MSI boards because they have buttons on the board for reset, power, clear cmos and the hex testers built on the board. Best board i've ever used.