[Wine] Re: BIOS Flash?

SpawnHappyJake wineforum-user at winehq.org
Wed Aug 17 13:21:11 CDT 2011


Yeah, I knew it could be done with FreeDOS, but I now only have a vague memory of native Linux BIOS flashing - I forgot about those.

I was just wondering out of theoretical curiosity if it is possible to initiate a BIOS flasher with WINE. By no means am I asking if the BIOS could actually flashed by running a program through WINE. I'm wondering if a BIOS-flashing "exe" can be initiated from within WINE, similar to what you see when you run one in Windows.
Last time I checked, it's impossible to actually flash your BIOS from within Windows. Rather (from what I gather), when you run the BIOS-flashing exe from Windows, stuff gets written to memory, and the computer is rebooted without cutting power to the RAM, and it boots into what was put in memory. You can, however, actually run the BIOS-flashing operation within a DOS.
So given that the BIOS-flasher is effectively its own operating system (when initiated from Windows) when actually doing the flash, whether the flasher is GUI based or CLI based has no relevance to whether WINE or FreeDOS is more suited to running a BIOS flasher, unless it needs to be passed arguments at time of initiation. Even then, WINE has a command prompt that would be able to handle that.

I find it very interesting and delightful that it is possible to flash non-system firmware (by that I mean any firmware other than the BIOS, EFI, etc.) through WINE. Hmm. EFI updates. Now there's an interesting thought.

Cheers,
Jake







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