updating bios / firmware with help of linux, without cds and usb pendrives

from time to time i have to upgrade different types of firmwares in PCs – sometimes it’s bioses, sometimes raid/network/ssd firmware. until now i was either burning cd-rw with iso provided by the vendor or making some bootable usb pen-drive with free-dos or sth similar.

but i stumbled on this one and it worked surprisingly well.

under debian i had to:

• install syslinux

  apt-get install syslinux 
  

place the iso file provided by the vendor in my boot filesystem partition [in my case it was also root]

• modify grub to include:

  menuentry "firmware" {
      insmod part_msdos
      insmod ext2
      set root='(hd0,msdos1)'
      linux16 /usr/lib/syslinux/memdisk iso
      initrd16 /isoWithFirmwareUpgrade.iso
  }
  

neat!