Hi Stefan!
Thanks for the fast reply! And the comforting words (although panic is for noobs, yes?) :-)

I updated flashrom as you suggested and ran it again. Thanks for that.
I think it worked fine. Here's the output:

desktop2@Desktop2:~/Downloads$ sudo flashrom -w 1101.BIN
flashrom v0.9.5.2-runknown on Linux 2.6.32-40-generic-pae (i686), built with libpci 3.0.0, GCC 4.4.3, little endian
flashrom is free software, get the source code at http://www.flashrom.org

Calibrating delay loop... OK.
Found chipset "NVIDIA MCP51". Enabling flash write... OK.
Disabling flash write protection for board "ASUS M2NBP-VM CSM"... OK.
Found SST flash chip "SST49LF040B" (512 kB, LPC) at physical address 0xfff80000.
Flash image seems to be a legacy BIOS. Disabling coreboot-related checks.
Reading old flash chip contents... done.
Erasing and writing flash chip... Erase/write done.
Verifying flash... VERIFIED.         
desktop2@Desktop2:~/Downloads$

What say you, doctor?
Thanks again.

~Dan


On Sun, 2012-04-22 at 23:03 +0200, Stefan Tauner wrote:
On Sun, 22 Apr 2012 13:59:00 -0600
Dan Kern Photo <dankernphoto@gmail.com> wrote:

> Hello,
> 
> I received the following while trying to use flashrom to install an
> updated bios.
> I'm running Ubuntu 10.04. I have an ASUS M2NBP-VM CSM motherboard.
> 
> 
>         desktop2@Desktop2:~/Downloads$ sudo flashrom -w 1101.BIN
>         flashrom v0.9.1-r946
> […]
> 
> What should I do now?

hello dan!

the most important thing is to not panic.
dont reboot or shut down until you are sure everything is ok.

if you have a backup of the original contents of the chip (made with
flashrom -r …), you can verify that nothing has changed (which is quite
probable) with flashrom -v <backup.file>.

you are using a very old version of flashrom, so please get a newer
version either by downloading the source and compiling it
manually (see http://flashrom.org/Downloads)
or by installing a package from
https://launchpad.net/~flashrom-developers/+archive/flashrom-daily.
your board should work out of the box with the current version.

if you still have problems it would be best if you would visit us on IRC
so that we can interact faster with each other. there is a webchat available here:
http://webchat.freenode.net/
we lurk in the chat room #flashrom.