I was having trouble getting my dvd burner to burn at maximum speed (8x) so I decided to take a chance and flash my firmware. I didn’t destroy my drive, but the upgraded firmware didn’t change anything so it’s kind of a letdown. I’m posting my method here for future reference.
Usually bios flashing is done from a floppy, but I have a modern laptop so I have no floppy. Flashing can also be done from a cdrom, but it’s a very bad idea to flash your CD drive from the CD drive!
My solution involved creating a small, ten megabyte vfat partition on my hard drive. If you don’t like the sound of that, stop reading. This is not a howto, just a set of notes. If you blow up your computer with these instructions, it’s not my fault.
1. burn a freedos cd as-is.
2. /sbin/swapoff /dev/hdaX to turn off my swap (oh yeah baby)
3. using /sbin/fdisk, delete my swap partition
4. recreate my swap partition, but leave off two of the blocks or so (about 10-16 megs)
5. create a partition of type 0xb (windows 95 32bit)
6. reboot to init new partition
7. /sbin/mkswap /dev/hdaX’ to reinit my new, slightly smaller swap
8. /sbin/swapon /dev/hdaX’
9. /sbin/mkfs.vfat /dev/hdaY to create new vfat partition
10. mount the vfat partition, copy the freedos command.com there (just in case) and all of the flashing utils / images
11. reboot with freedos cd
12. boot option 1, and then “safe mode”
13. change to c: (voila, now we are on the HD!)
14. run c:\command.com just in case (now we aren’t using the cdrom)
15. do flashing shit
16. reboot and pray you still have a cdrom
I think that’s everything.