Vlad Hrybok's Tech Notes

If you are upgrading your Windows XP system to Vista chances are you will need to upgrade your system's BIOS to support Vista. Flash utility for my MSI motherboard BIOS can't run from Windows (how nice on MSI part), and as lots of users nowadays my system does not have a floppy drive to boot DOS from. Making a bootable CD with just a basic set of drivers to allow enough memory for Flash utility turned out to be a very frustrating endeavor. There are lots of bootable CD images out there, but the most common problem with images is that they load bunch of drivers that take up a lot of memory and hang often. To flash a BIOS all you need from DOS is CD support. I spare you details of all the options and approaches I tried and get right to what you need to do to make a bootable CD and add your flash utility and BIOS file to it.

1. Download and save Windows ME bootable ISO image. Get WinME_bootdisk.iso file. Don't worry - it's not an entire Windows ME; it's just a 3MB DOS portion of it.
2. Download and install Magic ISO Maker, a small utility capable of modifying an existing ISO image.
3. Run Magic ISO Maker, open WinME_bootdisk.iso, add your Flash files, and save the WinME_bootdisk.iso file.
4. Burn WinME_bootdisk.iso to a CD.
5. Boot from the CD and in the boot menu select an option with a CD support. This option should leave enough "conventional" memory after loading DOS and drivers for the Flash utility to run. 
6. Your CD drive is likely to get letter "D:". Switch to CD drive by issuing D: command and run your Flash utility.