I agree that Flashing BIOS from Windows will work--generally, but occasionally you can run into problems.
Specs on the M52 show it has a floppy drive, and that's the next best way to attempt to flash your BIOS. It doesn't sound like you've done the "Floppy Flash" before, so it can be intimidating; but prior to the advent of cd-rom and dvd technologies, that was the predominant method of doing this procedure. I've done hundreds if not thousands of these. The M52 specs also shows that the BIOS support "
Boot Control" so you should be able to read the Bootable CD you created; but it's possible your optical drive is dusty--try blowing it out; especially
BOTH lenses since there 2 lenses; one for cd and one for dvd when you clean it with compressed air. Are you able to boot other bootable cd/dvd discs on that drive? Such as a WindowsXP or Win7 disc?
Ensure you can boot a known good bootable disc. If you cannot, that drive especially if it came with the original M52 could be several years old and faulty. Try booting to a usb external cd/dvd optical drive if you have one--however, many BIOSes will not support flashing via an external USB optical drive, even if the BIOS will let you boot from it!
Couple of things here for you to consider:
On this system, there is a BIOS "
Diskette Boot Inibit"; make sure that's disabled, othewise you'll be spending hours troubleshooting and trying to find a good floppy drive to work with your system and it will appear the internal floppy is bad; when in reality it's just this setting.
Have run into this on other computers like Gateway/eMachines as well.
Next thing is, prior to Flashing your BIOS, you should consider using a BIOS backup utility (the good ones are all free!) and make a backup copy of your BIOS to a clean floppy disk *that is once you get your floppy drive working for read/write*. There are several utilities on the ubcd linux tools set cd in the BIOS section that can assist you with that task. If you fail to do this step, and if you've never done the "
Floppy Flash" dance I mentioned above; it's easy to do it wrong and brick that new Motherboard replacement you just got! Take the extra time and use one of the utilities like
"!BIOS v3.20" AND BACKUP THAT BIOS to a floppy! This way, if you mess things up, you have a shot at re-flashing your BIOS from the backup floppy and rescuing the Motherboard.
I failed to do this one time, and got a bad BIOS download from the HP website, and bricked a Motherboard for my then largest Customer and bricked his Motherboard! I lost that Customer and all the derivable income that he had been providing me forever! Live and learn I guess.
Good luck with your "Flash Dance"!
BIGBEARJEDI