[flashrom] Success report: MSI A75MA-G55 (MS-7696)

Stefan Tauner stefan.tauner at student.tuwien.ac.at
Fri Oct 14 19:57:20 CEST 2011


On Thu, 13 Oct 2011 14:11:18 -0400
Bill McGonigle <bill at bfccomputing.com> wrote:

> 
> Thanks for flashrom! It enabled me to fix some problems I was having 
> without buying a copy of Windows.  Diagnostics for this board attached.
> 
> Say, MSI BIOS updating is a mess.  MSI provides a Windows-only tool, the 
> users on their forum have made a bootable-USB builder (Windows-only) 
> which installs a flash tool, and MSI endorses that, but the users say to 
> never use the flash tool that MSI distributes.  Worse yet, MSI no longer 
> distributes flash images via their website - they want you to update 
> with their Windows tool (apparently one can e-mail support for a copy of 
> the flash images; I just grabbed a final beta from the forum as I had 
> limited time).  The forum-users' tool apparently (from screenshots) can 
> also download the flash images from MSI (with versioning, so one can 
> downgrade).
> 
> Anyway, that's quite a bit of background to ask if it anybody has 
> discussed adding vendor-specific handlers/plugins to qflashrom.  If 
> that's desirable the logic for MSI could probably be ported over from 
> the Windows tool.  The flashrom LiveCD would be tremendously useful for 
> folks in the field with this sort of capability.
> 
> -Bill
> 


Hello Bill,

Thanks for your report!
I have marked the board as supported and will commit that later together
with other small changes.

Regarding the limitation of downloads at the MSI site: interesting news.
Google still finds some download links, and the user tool probably just
generates similar links as:
http://download1.msi.com/files/downloads/bos_exe/7696v13.zip
I agree that having such a (semi-automatic) way to update the firmware
of a mainboard would be a nice thing, but OTOH someone has to dedicate
lots of time to create and maintain such a plugin because URLs change a
lot. We notice that all the time for the product pages because we (used
to) link to them from http://www.flashrom.org/Supported_hardware.
Besides, there are enough other open problems that are more important
to address than downloading and extracting a zip for the user. ;)
-- 
Kind regards/Mit freundlichen Grüßen, Stefan Tauner




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