how to recover from a bad BIOS flash

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Thu, Oct 30, 2003 at 12:48:58PM -0500, Justin Zygmont wrote:
> I remember posting a  message about this a while ago, but couldn't 
> remember the link.  Well, I found it again and thought it was interesting 
> enough to pass along.  Unlike the article states, you probably don't need 
> the same motherboard, as long as it seats the same bios chip, and most of 
> them do.
> 
> http://www.thetechboard.com/tutorials/flashBIOS.php

Well some boards (Many intel and Asus boards among others) have had
emergency boot block bioses, that can boot to VGA, with floppy access
running DOS.  This allows you to reflash them.  They can not do USB,
they can not do IDE, or anything else however.  The last new Asus board
I used even had the flash util in the BIOS and could read the new bios
file from a floppy.

Some flashers read values from the old bios for onboard ethernet MAC and
such, so flashin on a different machine might not work so well.  For
simpler boards without the emergency boot block and such that might not
be an issue.

I haven't personally ever had a flash fail, which I guess just means I
had stable power supply and used the right bios for the board and the
right flash utility.  Always worth making sure of that before you start
flashing.

Lennart Sorensen
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