1) CPU is required for BIOS update flash here
2) Flash utilities are for DOS and Windows systems - I personally always use DOS and floppy disc, but if You can flash from Windows, You do not need floppy drive. But I dont know, if this is possible in this case...

First of all, before starting to think about a problem in this depth, wait for the components to arrive and actually give it a try. Maybe you don't have a problem at all.

@1: There are many options, some of them being:

(1) Regular flashing of the BIOS, you will need at least a CPU, memory, video card, and something to boot from, usually a floppy disk or a bootable CD-ROM. Boot to DOS and flash with the appropriate tool (e.g. awdflash for Award BIOSes or Phlash for Phoenix). They are quite simple to use. It's usually best to stick with the version that is (hopefully) supplied with the BIOS image file.

(2) If you had an external flash programmer, you could take out the BIOS chip and flash it externally. But since you've never flashed a BIOS before, I don't assume that you own such a device.

(3) Hot-flash in a different board. It works roughly like this: Find yourself a second board (with working CPU, memory, video obviously) that uses a compatible BIOS chip. Remove both chips from both boards. Put the original chip back into the socket, but don't push it all the way down, so you can still easily take it out while the system is running. Power on the system, boot with the original BIOS. Now carefully take out the BIOS chip, put in the chip you want to flash. Run the flashing utility (probably you need to use a command line switch to force the image onto the chip because the update utility will likely complain about the file not being compatible with the mainboard). Then power down the system, put both chips back onto their respective boards, voilà, you're done. This is not for the faint-hearted, but it works. If you have a second motherboard, that is.

(4) Some boards come with some sort of emergency BIOS updating routine that will still work if something goes wrong during the flashing process and you're left with a "dead" motherboard. Don't know if this particular board supports it.

(5) On some boards, the update can be invoked from the BIOS itself, no need to boot to an OS at all. You will have to supply the BIN file on some sort of removable storage. Again, don't know if your board supports it, I think this wasn't a thing before the Athlon XP era, but I could be wrong.

@2: Yes, a CD will work equally well. However, if you want to make a backup copy of your current BIOS before flashing, you will obviously need to save it to a writeable location like a floppy disk (which you don't have in that case) or a FAT-formatted hard drive or CF card.

Edit:
I just looked up your particular motherboard manual and there are two things to consider:

(1) There seems to be a jumper JP7 that enables write protection for the BIOS chip (see page 16). Make sure to set it accordingly before attempting to flash.

(2) The BIOS update files supplied on the ECS website don't come with the flashing utility included (BIOS images in BIN format only). The board uses an Award BIOS and the manual tells you to use the "AWD66.EXE" utility supplied on the driver CD, so that would almost certainly mean version 6.6. It's available for download here: https://www.wimsbios.com/awardflasher.jsp

Ydee wrote on 2021-02-01, 16:29:

1) CPU is required for BIOS update flash here
2) Flash utilities are for DOS and Windows systems - I personally always use DOS and floppy disc, but if You can flash from Windows, You do not need floppy drive. But I dont know, if this is possible in this case...

gex85 wrote on 2021-02-01, 17:04:

First of all, before starting to think about a problem in this depth, wait for the components to arrive and actually give it a t […]
Show full quote

First of all, before starting to think about a problem in this depth, wait for the components to arrive and actually give it a try. Maybe you don't have a problem at all.

@1: There are many options, some of them being:

(1) Regular flashing of the BIOS, you will need at least a CPU, memory, video card, and something to boot from, usually a floppy disk or a bootable CD-ROM. Boot to DOS and flash with the appropriate tool (e.g. awdflash for Award BIOSes or Phlash for Phoenix). They are quite simple to use. It's usually best to stick with the version that is (hopefully) supplied with the BIOS image file.

(2) If you had an external flash programmer, you could take out the BIOS chip and flash it externally. But since you've never flashed a BIOS before, I don't assume that you own such a device.

(3) Hot-flash in a different board. It works roughly like this: Find yourself a second board (with working CPU, memory, video obviously) that uses a compatible BIOS chip. Remove both chips from both boards. Put the original chip back into the socket, but don't push it all the way down, so you can still easily take it out while the system is running. Power on the system, boot with the original BIOS. Now carefully take out the BIOS chip, put in the chip you want to flash. Run the flashing utility (probably you need to use a command line switch to force the image onto the chip because the update utility will likely complain about the file not being compatible with the mainboard). Then power down the system, put both chips back onto their respective boards, voilà, you're done. This is not for the faint-hearted, but it works. If you have a second motherboard, that is.

(4) Some boards come with some sort of emergency BIOS updating routine that will still work if something goes wrong during the flashing process and you're left with a "dead" motherboard. Don't know if this particular board supports it.

(5) On some boards, the update can be invoked from the BIOS itself, no need to boot to an OS at all. You will have to supply the BIN file on some sort of removable storage. Again, don't know if your board supports it, I think this wasn't a thing before the Athlon XP era, but I could be wrong.

@2: Yes, a CD will work equally well. However, if you want to make a backup copy of your current BIOS before flashing, you will obviously need to save it to a writeable location like a floppy disk (which you don't have in that case) or a FAT-formatted hard drive or CF card.

Edit:
I just looked up your particular motherboard manual and there are two things to consider:

(1) There seems to be a jumper JP7 that enables write protection for the BIOS chip (see page 16). Make sure to set it accordingly before attempting to flash.

(2) The BIOS update files supplied on the ECS website don't come with the flashing utility included (BIOS images in BIN format only). The board uses an Award BIOS and the manual tells you to use the "AWD66.EXE" utility supplied on the driver CD, so that would almost certainly mean version 6.6. It's available for download here: https://www.wimsbios.com/awardflasher.jsp

Thanks both for the replies, particularly gex85 for the in depth response, appreciate it 😀. Naturally as you've mentioned, I am waiting to get all the parts, put it together and see if, like you said, I even have a problem at all. This was just a per-emptive attempt to be somewhat ready (knowledge wise) just in case. Given that in depth response, should this be necessary, I'll likely end up purchasing an external USB floppy and a ~500Mhz P3, should cost me another 20 or so if it comes to that.

I will be sure to read that entire manual before I attempt anything of course, I already saw the JP7 pin for example. I WAS a tad confused by the BIOS files supplied on the ECS website considering the BIOS files themselves are all executables, not bin files, but I'll put a pin in this for now. If I'm lucky this will have only been a theoretical learning experience. Thanks for the help 😉

Yeah, an external floppy drive + a cheap P3 would probably work best for you.

A bit of advice regarding BIOS updates and external USB floppy drives: In my experience, the quality of those external drives tends to vary a lot. If you just copy the BIOS files to the floppy disk with Windows Explorer, they sometimes end up being corrupt because of undetected write errors. While it's unlikely that a corrupted file will be actually written to the BIOS chip (the flashing utility would usually detect the corruption before writing the image), it can be pretty annoying.

It's usually safer to do it this way:

(1) Get a bootable floppy image
(2) Use WinImage or similar tool to inject the flashing utility and BIOS image file into the floppy image
(3) Write the image to disk, again with WinImage or similar, it will usually have a verification step enabled by default.

Regarding the executables on the ECS website: They are self-extracting Zip archives that contain the images in BIN format. Of course they need to be unzipped in Windows first (you can use 7-zip in case the executable doesn't work) and then the BIN file can be copied to the floppy disk and used for flashing.