BIOS upgrade problem

[Davide Ferrari]

El Thursday 06 March 2008 16:47:34 Jared escribió:
> The only differences that I can think of are that I was updating from
> v2.0.1, which is a bit newer than your version, and that before
> attempting this I first tried using the firmware .BIN file available
> through support.dell.com.  When that first option didn't work, I
> switched over to the manual method you used.  I don't think that should
> matter, but it is a difference...


I think it's something related to the kernel and the option I've added 
(reboot=bios), because I've just tried to reboot it again *without* doing 
anything related to BIOS upgrade (well, without doing anything at all, to be 
clear) and I'm experiencing the same issue (maching hangs just before 
reboot).

According to 

$ man 7 bootparam


‘reboot=[warm|cold][,[bios|hard]]’
       (Only  when  CONFIG_BUGi386  is  defined.)  Since 2.0.22 a reboot is by 
default a cold reboot.  One asks for the old default with ‘reboot=warm’.  (A 
cold reboot may be
       required to reset certain hardware, but might destroy not yet written 
data in a disk cache.  A warm reboot may be faster.)  By default a reboot is 
hard, by asking  the
       keyboard  controller  to  pulse  the  reset line low, but there is at 
least one type of motherboard where that doesn’t work. The 
option ‘reboot=bios’ will instead jump
       through the BIOS.


Maybe there's a problem with my current BIOS version on this machine (1.3.7), 
although I've looked in the changelog for 1.5.1 and 2.0.1 and there's no 
mention of a change that could resolve this problem.

-- 
Davide Ferrari
System Administrator