Aspire 5100 - How to flash to latest bios?

Wondering how to flash to the latest bios on this (3.13). It says in the readme to flash from DOS only. No dos here.

 

Thirty views, no answers?

 

Once you have the bios file from acer, unzip the package completely and you will see 2 folders dos and windows. Open the windows folder and then run the file flash32.exe. Once it is run it will check your current Bios and then begin the flashing process. The Bios on the 5100 series has 17 blocks so once the program is running you will see it zeroing out each block and then reprogramming it with the new data. Once it is finished if you cannot move the mouse or the keyboard doesn't respond the program will restart the notebook in 30secs anyway.

Caution: As always when flashing a Bios make sure your notebook is plugged in and that you have disabled(closed) any antivirus/firewall/anti-spyware along with any other software running as they may interfere with the flashing process.

I personally don't trust windows bios flashes anymore as once I got a bluescreen just before I decided to flash my bios a few months back. So now all I do is use a bootable usb flash drive and flash the bios outside of windows instead.

 

How do I flash from outside Windows? It does say flash only from dos so I should probably do that.

 

Inorder to flash from outside windows you will need to make a usb flash drive bootable(there was an HP tool that I used to do it and I can't remember where it is now) you will also need the files from a windows 98 boot floppy. Then place the files from the dos folder in the bios file you got from acer onto the drive.

Once the system boots to the usb drive (it will be command prompt at this time) you then need to run the .bat file on the usb drive to flash the bios.

If you aren't running a 64bit OS just run the flash32.exe file inside of windows instead it is much less complicated!

 

First of all, read and heed this very carefully: If you're not having trouble that the BIOS release notes specifically say they fixed, don't update the BIOS. There's enough risk built into BIOS updates, that unlike Windows updates, you shouldn't update your BIOS unless there's a good reason to.

In my case, I needed to. I used the download, and some of the instructions from bay-wolf dot com (sorry, I'm a newbie, they won't let me post the url... do a search for "baywolf usb boot disk" via Google. You want the one named "usbmemstick.htm".

In my case, using their windows 98 image didn't work right for me, so instead of their step 2 and Steps 6/7, I created an honest to goodness bootable floppy disk on an older computer that actually has a floppy drive, and created the USB bootable stick using that older computer using the HP utility from the above-mentioned article.

Since many people use the article at the link, you might get by ok using their Win98 image, though.

There's still just a bit of voodoo involved in making USB sticks bootable. If one brand USB stick doesn't work, another might.