The following is a brief outline of how I created a 4MB CD boot image to update the bios on a motherboard I have been considering buying. I do not have this motherboard, but I have tested the bootable CD up to the point of actually flashing the bios. FWIW, my computer runs PATA / IDE HDs and optical drives. Not SATA. Adjust accordingly to your distro, hardware, etc. I'm human, and make typos on occasion. So double check your input. (Also, CD-RWs are great to practice on :D) This is a compilation of various web pages, including the following: http://www.tuxrocks.com/Projects/CDProject/ http://members.chello.at/bobby100/ILpart1.htm http://afs.caspur.it/afs/italia/project/bigbox/e4/x86_64/latest/isolinux/isolinux.cfg http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-19428.html And this one, of course :) 1. Create and cd to ~/bootcd 2. Download and gunzip FDOEM.144.gz 3. Create ~/bootcd/floppy 4. Loop mount FDOEM.144 and copy the loop mounted files to ~/bootcd/floppy # mount -o loop -t vfat FDOEM.144 /mnt/floppy $ cp -r /mnt/floppy/* ~/bootcd/floppy/ 5. Unmount FDOEM.144 6. Create empty 4MB image: (Or whatever size you need.) $ dd if=/dev/zero of=disk.img bs=1M seek=4 count=0 7. Create a DOS file system on the empty 4MB image $ mkdosfs disk.img 8. Insert the FDOEM.144 boot sector into the 4MB disk image (copy the 446 byte boot code from the 1.44MB floppy image.) $ dd if=FDOEM.144 of=disk.img bs=1 count=446 seek=62 skip=62 conv=notrunc 9. Loop mount the 4MB image: # mount -o loop -t vfat disk.img /mnt/floppy 10. Copy files from ~/cdboot/floppy to /mnt/floppy # cp ~/cdboot/floppy/* /mnt/floppy/ 11. Copy required BIOS files to /mnt/floppy # cp DP0507C.BIO /mnt/floppy # cp IFLASH.EXE /mnt/floppy 12. Unmount the 4MB image 13. You may now need to install the 'SYSLINUX' package for your distro, or download the tarball from: http://syslinux.zytor.com/wiki/index.php/Download I used the Ubuntu-8.04.1 package, and it seemed to work OK for this purpose. 14. Copy isolinux.bin to ~/bootcd $ cp /usr/lib/syslinux/isolinux.bin ~/bootcd/ 15. Copy memdisk to ~/bootcd $ cp /usr/lib/syslinux/memdisk ~/bootcd/ 16. Create ~/bootcd/bootmsg.txt $ nano bootmsg.txt $ cat bootmsg.txt BIOS Update 17. Create ~/bootcd/isolinux.cfg $ nano isolinux.cfg $ cat isolinux.cfg default Bios prompt 1 timeout 1800 display bootmsg.txt label Bios kernel memdisk append initrd=disk.img floppy c=10 h=64 s=32 18. You may now delete or move FDOEM.144 and ~/cdboot/floppy $ cd ~/cdboot $ rm FDOEM.144 $ rm -r floppy 19. Your ~/bootcd directory listing should now look something like this: $ ls -al ~/bootcd total 7728 drwxr-xr-x 2 username username 4096 2009-01-01 21:25 . drwxr-xr-x 23 username username 4096 2009-01-01 21:21 .. -rw-r--r-- 1 username username 12 2009-01-01 21:19 bootmsg.txt -rw-r--r-- 1 username username 4194304 2009-01-01 21:20 disk.img -rw-r--r-- 1 username username 14061 2009-01-01 21:25 isolinux.bin -rw-r--r-- 1 username username 143 2009-01-01 21:20 isolinux.cfg -rw-r--r-- 1 username username 20068 2009-01-01 21:21 memdisk $ 20. Create ISO image: $ cd ~/bootcd $ genisoimage -o cdproject.iso -b isolinux.bin -c boot.cat -no-emul-boot -boot-load-size 4 -boot-info-table . 21. Burn ~/bootcd/cdproject.iso (Remember to adjust these options to your distro and hardware accordingly.) $ wodim -v -dao -eject speed=2 driveropts=burnfree dev=/dev/scd1 -data cdproject.iso 22. Boot from CD and test. End of proceedure. HTH