BIOS frustration

The motherboard in my computer (Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD5) has some neat features for updating the BIOS, including being able to update it from a USB drive without having to boot into an OS (Q-Flash).

Q-Flash worked pretty well in the past, but it seems to be limited to BIOS images less than 1MB.

The most recent (beta) BIOS updates for this motherboard have been just over 1.2 MB. Q-Flash no like.

There’s another utility called @BIOS that lets you flash BIOS updates from within Windows, but it only works in Windows.

Made an initial attempt at booting up FreeDOS to use Gigabyte’s DOS based FLASHSPI.EXE utility, but FreeDOS complained about the CD driver not being loaded for some reason. Guess where I put the BIOS image and FLASHSPI for flashing.

So now I’m stuck. Haven’t done much more with FreeDOS yet. Probably could get it working if I banged at it hard enough.

It’s frustrating though that there’s this perfectly good built-in Q-Flash utility for flashing the BIOS, but it’s crippled by a size limitation.

Really? A motherboard that supports 24GB of RAM, USB/SATA ports up the wazoo, a 2.8GHz quad-core CPU and it can’t flash a BIOS larger than 1MB. What is this, the 1980s?