BIOS Flashing with memdisk

(updated )

Source

I've just discovered memdisk. It's part of the syslinux package on Debian/Ubuntu, and hides in /usr/lib/syslinux/memdisk.

Memdisk lets you boot a floppy image, via grub or pxelinux. In this modern era of computers without floppy drives, it means you can do BIOS updates without having to go through the whole procedure of turning a floppy image into a bootable CD.

In PXELINUX, the config file would look like this:

DEFAULT memdisk initrd=FILENAME.img

In Grub, like this:

title     Bios Flash
kernel    /boot/memdisk
initrd    /boot/FILENAME.img

Thanks ThinkWiki for the idea.

Caveat emptor: apparently some flash tools don't like memdisk, so YMMV