Updating BIOS on mini 9 running OS X / Or creating a FreeDOS Bootable USB Drive

My Dell shipped with BIOS A01, A05 is the current one …. there is a WinXP download and a DOS download. Well I wasn’t about to re-install XP to upgrade the BIOS, so instead a made a bootable freedos usb stick.

Tip! Before you install OSX, upgrade the BIOS, I wish I had done this.

But if like me you need to do this another way, read on. You will need another computer.

I followed the instructions here: http://wiki.fdos.org/Installation/BootDiskCreateUSB

There weren’t great though, so I am going to re-write the instruction for building the USB stick under linux (I used CentOS).

1. Download makebootfat (version 1.4 at the time of this writing) and compile it using
   1. $ tar -xvf makebootfat-1.4.tar.gz
   2. $ cd makebootfat-1.4
   3. $ ./configure
   4. $ make
   5. Don’t worry about a make install
2. Goto: http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/distributions/1.0/pkgs/ and grab kernels.zip, commandx.zip and unstablx.zip
3. Unzip these three files
4. Create a temporary folder, inside this folder create a folder named “fs-root”.
5. You want to ignore almost all of the files that you just unzipped. Look for “command.com” and “kernel.sys” and copy them to your fs-root directory.
6. Look for:  fat12.bin, fat16.bin and fat32lba.bin. Copy them to the temporary directory you just created. CD to that directory.
7. If your still with me, excellent. /dev/sdb was the device for my usb key, it might be sda or sdc.
   $ sudo /Path/to/makebootfat -o /dev/sdb -1 fat12.bin -2  fat16.bin -3 fat32lba.bin fs-root

Well if all that worked great- you now have a bootable freedos usb key, you can fill the rest of it up with normal stuff.

For those doing this for the mini 9, copy the BIOS flash tool to the usb stick, make sure Legacy USB support is on your Dell, and reboot your mini from the usb stick.