New BIOS update failure case?

[Joe Malicki]

Today I started seeing a BIOS update failure case that's new to me.

On
  1) Dell 860s with BIOS A03 going to A05 (or downgrading vice versa), or
     2850s with BIOS A04 or A05 going to A06 (or downgrading vice versa),
  2) using a 32bit 2.6.24.7 kernel,
  3) running dellBiosUpdate inside a large (200+MB compressed) ramdisk,
  4) Using reboot=bios
 
The update appears to work, the machine reboots, "Attempting BIOS update"
is printing, a failure message is NOT printed, but then upon rebooting,
the BIOS version has not changed.

If I change #4 to not use reboot=bios, the update fails, but at least
an error message is printed that the BIOS update failed.  Similar cases
have worked before, but I haven't yet narrowed down exactly what had,
or what needs to be different, yet.

2950 (v2 or v3) work fine in all of the above cases.

I just find it odd that it doesn't say the update failed (or if it does,
it's far too quick for my eye, and I do see it without reboot=bios) -
is there something that could cause that chain of events?

Thanks,
Joe Malicki