Flashing SuperMicro bios (X7DVL-3) with USB stick/drive/pen/flash
Flashing BIOS should be an easy thing, assuming you have floppy drives in both server and desktop - not to mention still owns disketts. Here is how you flash it with a USB drive instead.
- Format your USB drive (if you own a sandisk and want to remove the extra partition with the annoying software on it (depending on how good your bios is to boot from USB - this can be a must) view this post
- Download HP Create Boot Utility (Google for sources)
- Download win98boot.zip (Google for sources)
- Unpack win98boot.zip to folder win98boot (make sure to retain folder structure)
- Install HP Create Boot Utility
- Run HP Create Boot Utility
- Choose your USB drive
- Choose "Create Boot disk" from source: <Choose your win98boot folder>
- Download your bios firmware (or unpack the .exe from supermicro, I used a virtual a: drive with paralells to do this: Create the floppy in parallels (win xp), run the supermicro flash .exe, copy the files from a:)
- Copy all the files into your USB drive
- Unmount USB
- Put your USB drive in your server
- Go into BIOS menu, boot options
- Make sure your USB drive is high on the boot priority, I usually use: 1: USB, 2: CD, 3: HDD
- Exit bios, let the USB drive boot
- Run "flash <your bios version>.rom". (If you don't have a <your bios version>.rom, you probably have a <your bios version>.zip, use: "unzip <your bios version>.zip"
- It will flash and restart the server. When it does, remove your USB stick
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