Recently I had to flash an Intel mainboard on a PC with linux installed. The simplest methold would be to create an CD with the iso provided by Intel I thougt. But that didn't work, the CD refused to boot (I wasn't really surprised).

The only alternative was to boot from an USB drive. Here's how I did it:

1. plug an USB-Floppy into my Win XP Workstation
2. format drive A: with the option “create an MS-DOS startup-disk” enabled
3. download Bart's MKBT
4. run mkbt -c a: bootsect.bin to extract the bootsector to the file bootsect.bin
5. insert USB drive, verfy the drive letter assigned (here: F:)
6. backup everything on the USB drive
7. format the USB drive with FAT
8. write the bootsector on the USB drive: mkbt -x bootsect.bin F:
9. copy everything else from A: to F:
10. don't forget to copy the flash-utility too
11. ready to boot