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October 7th, 2012 10:00

Boot from USB or DVD with UEFI to upgrade bios

Hello,

I have a Alienware Aurora R4. I am trying to upgrade the BIOS from A03 to A05. My system uses the UEFI boot loader. I am having issues booting into anything except windows.

I have tried making a bootable USB flash drive with both the HP disk storage format tool and Rufus using both the win98 and FreeDOS as the OS. The bootable flash drive is recognized when I do F12 and I chose it to boot. It goes directly into windows.

I tried booting from the drivers and utilities disk and again it goes directly into windows.

In my BIOS I have the boot order set to UEFI device then CD/DVD the HD and still it will not boot from either of those devices.

Is it possible that this is due to UEFI? As I understand it that is a 64 bit application and will not recognize any 32 bit OS like DOS. Is this true?

Do I have to go into the BIOS and change it to Legacy boot instead of EUFI and if I do that will I have any problems booting after I do the BIOS upgrade and change it back to EUFI?

Thank you,

Mike

6.4K Posts

October 7th, 2012 13:00

I believe you have solved your own problem.  If you need to boot from a USB device, it will need the appropriate UEFI boot information unless your BIOS has an option to fall back to legacy boot automatically.

Updating the BIOS normally resets the configuration to the default configuration for the computer.  If you do manage to update the BIOS, you will need to look through the BIOS setup page to be sure your settings are correct.  I wouldn't be surprised if the first setting you needed to make was to switch the boot mode back to UEFI.

9 Legend

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47K Posts

October 7th, 2012 13:00

try making a usb live  linux boot.

Universal USB Installer – Easy as 1 2 3

Download Universal-USB-Installer-1.9.1.1.exe

knoppix 6.7 or 7.x would be my choice

Klaus Knopper has published a new Knoppix version: KNOPPIX 6.7.1 / ADRIANE 1.4 - Live CD / DVD

2.4K Posts

October 9th, 2012 18:00

try making a usb live  linux boot.

 

Universal USB Installer – Easy as 1 2 3

 

Download Universal-USB-Installer-1.9.1.1.exe

 

knoppix 6.7 or 7.x would be my choice

 

Klaus Knopper has published a new Knoppix version: KNOPPIX 6.7.1 / ADRIANE 1.4 - Live CD / DVD

 



I use Linux Live USB Creator and it works really well:http://www.linuxliveusb.com/ 

To boot on UEFI systems you just check the EFI box. Works like a dream. I carry an old 1GB USB flash drive on my key chain with Ubuntu 12.04.

5826.usb-rainbow.png

11 Posts

October 7th, 2012 18:00

Hey guys,

Thank you for the info.

I went back to legacy and it was able to boot into dos. I tried execution the bios update and this is the info I got...

Check model name...ok

version

current A03

new bios version A05

The ME version are the same

Y update

x exit

I press Y and I get

Error: problem allocating BIOS buffer.

Why?

I would appreciate any help.

Thank you

Mike

6.4K Posts

October 9th, 2012 16:00

It appears that the executable is seeking a "helper" application that is unavailable in DOS.  Most BIOS upgrades these days are intended to be run from within the OS that was supplied with the system.  You might try copying the executable file to a folder on your desktop, booting to Windows Safe Mode, and double-clicking the file to execute it.

4 Operator

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4.4K Posts

May 18th, 2013 03:00

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