[ILUG] [TOTD] flash bios in linux

[Niall O Broin]

On 13 Aug 2004, at 16:37, Niall Sheridan wrote:

> The other way to recover is to pull the dead chip from the 
> motherboard, take it to a machine with an identical bios, write the 
> working BIOS image to a file. Then (carefully) pull the good chip 
> while the machine is powered on and drop in the bad one and write the 
> working image to it.

It should be noted that best case here is you end up with two working 
motherboards + BIOS chips. Worst case is one dead motherboard + two 
dead BIOS chips. Where you will land on the continuuum is hard to 
predict in advance. This was (reasonably) SOP on Sun machines, where 
the NVRAM chip, which also held the RTC + a battery, used die after a 
few years, if you didn't have a spare handy. But the Sun NVRAM chip was 
of a physically different format, and was easier to hot swap than a 
current PC ROM BIOS chip.


Niall