Just a quick post about a problem I’m sure someone else might encounter if you happend to use old HP servers.

I needed to upgrade the BIOS and the HP LO100i firmware. But on the HP websites they only provided a tool that creates the required floppy disks to perform the flash. Well, that won’t work since I haven’t got any floppy drives on my DL145 G1.

Here is how I managed to successfully upgrade the firmware using a USB-stick:

• Download the floppy disk “images” from HP website. They are really .exe files that creates bootable floppies that contain the new firmware and flash tools.
• This step might be optional, but I installed Windows Server 2003 inside VirtualBox for maximum compatibility with their tools. I then gave my virtual machine direct access to my USB-stick and ran all the steps below inside the virtual machine.
• Install a virtual floppy drive
• Install Rufus
• Use Rufus to create a bootable USB-stick with FreeDOS as operating system
• Use the HP tools to write the required files to the virtual floppy drive
• Create a folder called “flash” on the newly created bootable USB-stick (lets pretend it’s mounted as K:)
• Copy all files from A:\ (including hidden ones) to K:\flash
• Unmount the USB-stick and boot your DL145 using the USB-stick
• Once booted into FreeDOS run the flash tool we copied earlier to the “flash” folder like this:
  “c:\flash\rompaq.exe /l:us /! “
• Follow the instuctions
• Congratulations, you should now have successfully flashed the new firmware