[flashrom] Double success story

[Maarten]

Hi all!

I'm here to tell you an success story with flashrom. It is about how
flashrom solving problems created by using official tools.

My first problem emerged when I tied to flash my EPIA-SP to it's latest bios
release (I had some problems with PAL output). Well, VIA has a WinXP and a
DOS tool available. I don't have any XP install so I decided to stick to
FreeDOS. Took me two hours or so but after that I was all set. Having a hard
drive with FreeDOS, viaflash and my image file, I began. I told viaflash to
write the image file to flash. It said "Writing NOW!!!". There was no
progress bar or anything, so I don't know when it crashed. But it did and it
locked the computer completely, as I found out 10 minutes later. Power cable
out, power cable in, no boot.

Bricked. Nice. In an epic quest to find a suitable machine for hotswapping
(I want a chip programmer this christmas, seriously) I found my neighbors
PC. Same flash, same southbridge. Perfect! After some preparations for
hotswapping I booted my GRML Linux disk, told flashrom to write my image,
verified it once more and I were done. If I only used flashrom the first
time... It would have saved me two days of messing around with all kinds of
hardware and inferior pieces of software. Lesson learned.

And now I knew how the job was done I also decided to update my laptop's
bios. Stupid fuck I am I decided to erase the chip prior to backing it up
and/or checking whether the update file did fit into my flash at all. It
turned out to be bigger than 1024k and I panicked somewhat. Luckily a bunch
of helpful people on IRC helped me to get a working image out of a >1024k
Phoenix flash file (it has a footer) and after some commands I had updated
my laptop too. Lesson learned here: Don't throw away your old landing gear
in mid-flight if you are not sure whether your updated landing gear actually
fits in the airplane.

tnx for the great tools!


grtz,

Maarten "merethan"
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