Documentation

[Carl-Daniel Hailfinger]

Hi Michael,

On 26.09.2007 12:52, Michael_Ramendik at Dell.com wrote:
> I am a Dell tech writer (and independently a Linux user and supporter).
> I am willing to do some good documentation work for the Dell open source
> efforts. Michael Brown told me to join this list to coordinate - so here
> I am :)

Welcome!

> I find firmware-tools an excellent idea and, in fact, long overdue (just
> as DKMS is). I Some months ago I ruined a (non-Dell) mobo flash simply
> because I had no floppy drive in the computer; I booted DOS off a CD,
> but the flashing ended the wrong way, and I had to order a new chip from
> a UK "flasher" company. I borrowed the tool to remove the BIOS chip from
> work - i.e. from Dell EMF1 of all places :)

If you had known about flashrom from the LinuxBIOS project, you would
have been saved as well. flashrom can flash any BIOS image to any BIOS
chip as long as the size fits.
In your case, you would have proceeded as follows: Boot a working
machine with a BIOS socket where your chip would fit physically into
Linux, run flashrom -V to ID the existing chip, if that works, remove
the working chip while the machine is running, plug in the dead chip,
run flashrom -V again to find out whether the chip is recognized
correctly, run flashrom -w with the BIOS image for the dead machine,
verify the flashing with flashrom -v, switch off the machine, remove
your nicely recovered flash chip, plug it into the dead machine, plug
the flash chip from the working machine back and be happy.
While hot-removing a flash chip may sound scary, it is actually safe
unless you plug it in the wrong way.

We (the LinuxBIOS project) are working on flashrom support for Dell
machines (and some already work), but right now our tesing base is
limited. We know that almost all nForce4/5 mainboards work and many of
those with an Intel chipset work as well.

If you have any questions, just ask.

Regards,
Carl-Daniel