Hi all!
I'm here to tell you an success story with flashrom. It is about how flashrom solving problems created by using official tools.
My first problem emerged when I tied to flash my EPIA-SP to it's latest bios release (I had some problems with PAL output). Well, VIA has a WinXP and a DOS tool available. I don't have any XP install so I decided to stick to FreeDOS. Took me two hours or so but after that I was all set. Having a hard drive with FreeDOS, viaflash and my image file, I began. I told viaflash to write the image file to flash. It said "Writing NOW!!!". There was no progress bar or anything, so I don't know when it crashed. But it did and it locked the computer completely, as I found out 10 minutes later. Power cable out, power cable in, no boot.
Bricked. Nice. In an epic quest to find a suitable machine for hotswapping (I want a chip programmer this christmas, seriously) I found my neighbors PC. Same flash, same southbridge. Perfect! After some preparations for hotswapping I booted my GRML Linux disk, told flashrom to write my image, verified it once more and I were done. If I only used flashrom the first time... It would have saved me two days of messing around with all kinds of hardware and inferior pieces of software. Lesson learned.
And now I knew how the job was done I also decided to update my laptop's bios. Stupid fuck I am I decided to erase the chip prior to backing it up and/or checking whether the update file did fit into my flash at all. It turned out to be bigger than 1024k and I panicked somewhat. Luckily a bunch of helpful people on IRC helped me to get a working image out of a >1024k Phoenix flash file (it has a footer) and after some commands I had updated my laptop too. Lesson learned here: Don't throw away your old landing gear in mid-flight if you are not sure whether your updated landing gear actually fits in the airplane.
tnx for the great tools!
grtz,
Maarten "merethan"