2010/4/12 Carl-Daniel Hailfinger c-d.hailfinger.devel.2006@gmx.net:
On 12.04.2010 10:56, Magnus Alm wrote:
Thanks for the try, but the laptop shut it self down while I was asleep. And it's a brick now. Shit happens, first time I managed to kill a main-board in those 17 years I've worked with computers.
You can recover with a soldering iron and an external flasher (a $10 used mainboard with parallel flash on ebay might suffice).
A patch that changed this output would have been better if it was already in place when I tested it:
+WARNING! DON'T DO A "flashrom -EV" ON A LAPTOP THO, SINCE IT MIGHT TURN IT INTO A BRICK!
A better text would be: "Running pure erase (flashrom -E) on a laptop with shared flash is guaranteed to brick it. Running write (flashrom -w) on a laptop with shared flash has a high chance of bricking it. To recover, you will have to desolder the flash chip from your mainboard. You have been warned."
The fact that pure write worked for you was just luck. Really.
Every software project with the chance of bricking hardware has such warnings, and forums and mailing lists are filled with complaints from people who ignored the warnings or acted in possibly dangerous ways and then made a typo at the wrong moment. The MPlayer developers (and their software can't even brick anything AFAICS) simply wrote that everybody who doesn't read the manual or who ignores warning/error messages will be ridiculed and flamed in public. No idea if this is still the current policy, but it worked very well for them in the past. I think that such behaviour may be very effective, but it wouldn't be in line with our friendliness principle. If warning messages are too obnoxious, distributions will patch them out (see the various distribution patches for old cdrecord out there).
This problem is fundamentally unsolvable on a technical level, and needs to be addressed (and hopefully solved) as a social problem.
No offense intended.
No pun taken, testing such stuff is risky and I have just myself to blame.
Writing too and reading from bios worked just fine with Micheals patch tho.
Regards, Carl-Daniel
Cheers
/Magnus