present efforts on my HP laptop

[ME]

ME said:
> Suggestions:
> 1) use a friend's, work, school, or *other* machine running windows to
> get the program to run to make the BIOS upgrade diskette. or
> 2) try the route of dosemu (not for the novice)
> or
> 3) see if the upgrade application is just a specialized self extracting
> zip file. You can try this by using "unzip" from bash in Linux if you
> have zip/unzip installed. If this is the case, you may be able to
> extract the necessary boot files to floppy without DOS/Windows. or
> 4) if the diskette writing application is not compressed, you can try to
> search for the contents of the image inside the app, seek passed the
> executable code to just the data, and then write that out to disk. (not
> for novice) ...

Sorry, I left this part out...

Once you get the data extracted into file format, or onto a loopback
mounted floppy disk image, You can use that to make a bootable CD. (Needs
the image of the floppy to be bootable, or the image from the floppy needs
to come from a floppy that is bootable). Then, you can boot from the
bootable CD tyo do the upgrade.
(Sorry to omit this critical step in my original post *after* you are able
to extract the data to a floppy ande/or get the files.)

-ME