Better read the small print of an PC BIOS update!
So we got some new PC server mainboard, and the latest greatest AMD Phenom II X6 CPU. Of course the BIOS would not recognized the CPU, just list an “unknown” CPU, and let it run at a bare 800MHz. Apparently no real OS wanted to boot in protected mode either. So I thought it’d be a good idea to update the BIOS to the latest, greatest. However, turned out that wasn’t so much of an good idea: after the update the board would not boot up anymore. No sign of the BIOS at all, …
The board vendor, however, was so nice to handle our support inquiry nicely and sent out a new 8-pin, serial EEPROM last Friday, and it even arrived the following day, that is Saturday!
So with the new EPROM in the board it actually booted again (puh!), and re-reading the BIOS Release Notes I found that it indicates running the DOS flash EXE with some special arguments, that I obviously did not include when I just run it intuitively the fist time:
PFUDOS.EXE FILENAME /p /b /c
How nice. If I would author some BIOS flash utility, I would rather write it in a way that a run with default, that is without fancy parameters would produce a reasonable, good outcome, …
Anyway, another note: After booting I removed the second, new, good ROM and injected the old, bad flash, and then used above run with fancy parameters to flash it again, and voila: I finally had an BIOS ROM with the latest version that worked :-)!
And yet another note: Flashing from an bootable USB stick with FreeDOS worked just fine.
