is it possible to make a BIOS usb key for a PC on a MAC?

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Level 1

119 points

is it possible to make a BIOS usb key for a PC on a MAC?

I am not sure where to ask this question but If I needed to make a BIOS flash drive for a PC computer such as an HP Laptop or Desktop, would it be possible to do on the MacBook Pro running OS X Mountain Lion? I ask this because I thought I was going to need to make a BIOS flash update for an HP system and I did not want to use a CD to do it. I had downloaded the flash drive tool from HP which under a windows system would make a USB flash drive. I tried running the tool under Windows 7 on both a VM session and a boot camp session but both times I would get a message saying something similar to "You don't have permission" even though I was doing it as an admin. Turns out I didn't need it anyway but for future references can I even make a bootable usb key for a PC on a Mac?

MacBook Pro, OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.4)

Posted on Dec 28, 2013 9:54 PM

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Answer 1

mende1

Level 10

93,624 points

Dec 28, 2013 10:06 PM in response to praiford

You do not need the HP utility to format the USB drive. Instead, you can use Disk Utility to format an external drive in "MS-DOS (FAT)" as Format and with a MBR partition table > http://pondini.org/OSX/DU1.html If you want to format the USB drive in Windows, make sure you format it in FAT32.

After doing that, just copy the files you need to the USB drive. If they are bootable, you will be able to start up from the USB drive with any computer (PC or Mac)

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Answer 2

praiford Author

Level 1

119 points

Dec 29, 2013 5:51 PM in response to mende1

Thank you for the info. I found the problem that I had under the Windows 7 on Mac was the extractor(hpusbf.exe) was not running under the Admin mode so it wasn't given permission to modify the usb File system. I think the other issue is that I was trying this on a 8GB flash drive and it kept telling me the partition was too large. I found the switch to use 2048 blocks and it created a bootable flash drive. The problem I have now is when I tried it on my old HP laptop, it boots up saying "FreeDos Fat" and stops. So I don't know what is going on but I think I am going to stick to making bootable CDs I just have to get some Re-writable CDs so I don't waste the CDs.

I tried your solution on the mac side and tried copying the dos files over but the drive would not boot. I think the problem is that the command.com file is not set as a system file. I am not sure how you can set command.com as a system file for windows under the MAC operating system. I know in windows you use attrib +S filename.

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