Flashing a new bios on an old Laptop.

Linux Support
1

I have resurrected an old Laptop and installed peppermint 3 via cd. The Bios does not support usb booting and I wondered if it was possible to upgrade the bios by flashing it with a new one…and how?

Compaq Presario V5000 (V5215ea) 1gb ram xp dual boot with Peppermint 3.

Thanks

2

Well you could but I seriously doubt any newer BIOS would add support for booting USB removable media … so you’d be risking bricking the PC for no real benefit.

Does the CD/DVD drive not work ?

If not, have you got a USB CD/DVD drive ?

3

Sorry for the delay

It has a cd drive built in.

The main reason to boot from usb is to try different distros. Burning cd’s is so long winded.

I’ll just have to live with it.

I remember years ago in my XP days that my old computers were able to have bios upgrades. What happened?

4
I remember years ago in my XP days that my old computers were able to have bios upgrades. What happened?
You still can upgrade your bios, though this wll also give you a chance to brick it. :D As far as I can tell the latest bios is F.24 A (16 Oct 2007) and there is no mention in the revision history for adding booting from USB devices.
5

As SeZo suggests … nothing “happened” … you can still (usually) update a BIOS.

But I’ve NEVER seen a BIOS update that added support for booting USB removable media where it wasn’t already present… they are usually just bug fixes and adding CPU support for new CPU’s

6

Thanks Guys