I need to upgrade the Award BIOS on an MSI motherboard. Rather than following MSI's procedure (boot on Windows system floppy and run AWFL####.EXE), I'm thinking of booting on a Linux CD and using flashrom.
Are there any particular pitfalls to doing that ?
A dump of the current BIOS (flashrom -r bios.bin) reveals that the flash ROM contains some machine-dependent data in three areas (0h-5C0h, 1000h, 74E31h-74E3Fh). Am I supposed to use -s and -e to skirt around it ? Or do I just flash the whole 512 kB and re-do the BIOS config ?
The motherboard is an MSI K8N Neo4 Platinum V1. The flash chip is a Pm49FL004T-33JC.
Thanks.
On 25.08.2007 19:43, Andre Majorel wrote:
I need to upgrade the Award BIOS on an MSI motherboard. Rather than following MSI's procedure (boot on Windows system floppy and run AWFL####.EXE), I'm thinking of booting on a Linux CD and using flashrom.
Are there any particular pitfalls to doing that ?
Yes. You may lose the MAC address of your board.
A dump of the current BIOS (flashrom -r bios.bin) reveals that the flash ROM contains some machine-dependent data in three areas (0h-5C0h, 1000h, 74E31h-74E3Fh). Am I supposed to use -s and -e to skirt around it ? Or do I just flash the whole 512 kB and re-do the BIOS config ?
I'm not sure -s -e work with your flash chip yet.
The motherboard is an MSI K8N Neo4 Platinum V1. The flash chip is a Pm49FL004T-33JC.
Regards, Carl-Daniel
On Sat, Aug 25, 2007 at 07:43:55PM +0200, Andre Majorel wrote:
I need to upgrade the Award BIOS on an MSI motherboard. Rather than following MSI's procedure (boot on Windows system floppy and run AWFL####.EXE), I'm thinking of booting on a Linux CD and using flashrom.
Just an additional hint: forget about the CDROM, you don't need it. Just boot Linux and run flashrom while the system is running, there's no need for bootable CDROMs and such.
Uwe.
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Andre Majorel -
Carl-Daniel Hailfinger -
Uwe Hermann