[conspire] conspire Digest, Vol 100, Issue 13

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Tony Godshall (tony at of.net):

> I was able to upgrade a BIOS recently using cabextract to get the .BIN out
> of the .EXE file and then using FreeDOS.  If the above are insufficient
> clues for you and the search engine of your choice to figure out the rest,
> let me know and I'll see if I can locate and make coherent my notes.

My own advice to Bruce, when he posed this problem in-person at a recent
CABAL meeting, was:  Swap in a spare hard drive for this purpose,
install $MICROSOFT_OS on it for this purpose, flash the firmware, and
then swap your regular hard drive back in.

You really don't want ROM-flashing to go sideways in mid-rewrite, so
extra variables are to be avoided.

oI'd possible there might be a way to lob the binary blob into the ROM
from FreeDOS.  I wouldn't know.  Bruce _claimed_ that the standard
hardware-provided method was via a Win32 binary; whether that binary's
unpacking and ROM-writing functions can be provided using other software
is an interesting question that, personally, I would want other people
to test out with their hardware, not mine.