I have a five year old NEC VERSA 4080H laptop computer.  I want to
update the BIOS to get support for large disk drives.  Does anybody know
of a way to do that from NetBSD (or FreeBSD or Linux)?  According to a
data sheet, the BIOS is stored in an Intel N28F020-150 256kB flash chip.

NEC's official way of updating the BIOS involves booting from a
specially prepared floppy disk, but I don't have a floppy drive for
this laptop.  I tried burning the floppy disk image onto CD, and that
boots, but the update program complains that the flash memory is write
protected, and implies that this might be because too much has happened
between power up and running the update program.

I also tried burning a bootable CD that contained a third party DOS
application called Uniflash, but that complains about a failure to find
the PCI bus (which is not surprising, since as far as I know everything
is on an ISA bus).

--apb (Alan Barrett)