How to flash a bios

The BIOS is usually flashed in DOS. Sometimes BIOS vendors provide official tools to flash the BIOS from within Windows, or even Linux, but it's still safer to flash in a pure DOS environment. Fortunately it's quite easy to make a bootable DOS USB stick with the help of FreeDOS and Unetbootin, which is available for both Windows and Linux.


1 Linux

Please note that the instructions are meant for Fedora, or variants of it like the modified distribution pre-installed on the Acer Aspire One, but can be easily adapted to other distributions and package managment systems. So instead of yum use apt-get for Ubuntu or Debian. The package names are likely the same, and the packages may in fact already be installed.


Open a terminal. On the distribution pre-installed on the AA1 press Alt+F2 and check the checkbox to do so.


sudo yum install syslinux p7zip-plugins
wget -O unetbootin-bios http://downloads.sourceforge.net/unetbootin/unetbootin-linux-293
chmod 755 unetbootin-bios
sudo ./unetbootin-bios &


Select FreeDOS and the device node, just like in the screenshot, and click OK. The device node is usually /dev/sdb1 if only one USB device is connected.


1 Windows

Just download the file from here. Select FreeDOS and the drive letter of the USB drive, just like in the screenshot, and click OK.


2 Extract all files from the BIOS zip file onto the USB drive.


3 Reboot and press F12 to select a bootable device.


4 Choose option 5 when prompted by FreeDOS and ignore the error about a missing CD-ROM. Change to drive C: by typing C: and if that doesn't work try drive B: instead. If it then still doesn't work, or if FreeDOS doesn't even boot to a prompt, try a different USB drive as the AA1 can be a bit picky.


5 Run the batch file to flash the BIOS by simply entering its filename, which is 3310.BAT for the latest BIOS version. The process usually takes only a few seconds. The AC adapter must be connected or the flash utility will wait until it is.


6 After successfully flashing the BIOS the AA1 will reboot by itself. A few BIOS settings will be reset to default values and might need to be readjusted if they were altered before.