No.

You will probably damage your drive that way. Boot into real ms-dos. Get a bootable floppy (www.bootdisk.com) or a bootable cd-rom.

update hardwere bios with dosbox ...bad idea 🤣
it wasn't made to do that ...

Don't worry, you'll most likely have exactly no effect. Couldn't imagine dosbox allows that kind of direct access.

Windows XP allows you to create an MS-DOS boot disk: just put an empty disk in your floppy drive, right click it, choose "format", and check the box that says "copy system files" (or something like that) and go. Copy your bis files/programs on that disk. You can then boot real ms-dos, suitable for bios-updates.

I don't think DOSBox could do that. It has even less direct access to your hardware than most Windows programs. If you run a firmware flasher in DOSBox, it'll try to talk to an emulated drive instead of your real one (and fail) anyways...

Unfortunately boot disks are still the only option for manufacturers that are too lazy to make Windows-based flashers. A lot of optical drive manufactuerers have Windows-based firmware flashers now...

HunterZ wrote:

Unfortunately boot disks are still the only option for manufacturers that are too lazy to make Windows-based flashers. A lot of optical drive manufactuerers have Windows-based firmware flashers now...

Which is about the worst thing one could do. Being interrupted while flashing can screw up the whole device being flashed. Windows (just like any other multitasking system) is like asking for these things to happen. DOS is a comparativley safe environment.

Manufacturers should create bootable CDs/CD images that do the flashing... a 5-minute job for someone with freedos and a burner program.

Agreed. Although I have flashed bios on this mainboard (at work) using Windows XP, it feels unsafe. If you have the option for flashing using plain old ms-dos, take it.

Hmm. And another WORD OF ADVICE. It is highly recommended to have an UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply - did I spell it right? ) support while flashing. I have seen too many horror stories of damaged mainboards because the power went off while flashing.

bootable flasher are much sweeter for people who don't use windows

I guess one advantage of bootdisk flashing is that it doesn't matter what OS you're running (which I guess is what Qbix is hinting at).

Windows-based flashers can be safe for non-critical hardware such as CD/DVD drives.

For the motherboard BIOS, you have to reboot to run the new image anyways, so there's not much drawback to flashing from a floppy. I've noticed that many motherboards have the flash utility on-board now, and some also have multiple flash ROMs in case something goes wrong while flashing.