I'm going to be slow about this as I don't want to brick my very useful notebook, but the bios read seemed to work successfully. Here is the output from the read operation. This is an old IBM T30 and it pretty much does everything I need as it stands. It does need an upgraded bios to accommodate some updated wifi features.
I'm really concerned about performing the write operation.
<------------> #sudo flashrom -r original.rom [sudo] password for <name> Calibrating delay loop... OK. No coreboot table found. Found chipset "Intel ICH3-M", enabling flash write... OK. Found chip "ST M50FW080" (1024 KB) at physical address 0xfff00000. === This flash part has status UNTESTED for operations: PROBE READ ERASE WRITE Please email a report to flashrom@coreboot.org if any of the above operations work correctly for you with this flash part. Please include the full output from the program, including chipset found. Thank you for your help! === Reading flash... done. <------------->
This created the following file -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1048576 2009-07-16 12:52 original.rom
More when I ramp up my bravery (foolishness).
Chet