[geeks] recover from HP Pavilion failed BIOS update

[Nate]

On Tue 27/04/10  3:57 PM , Phil Stracchino alaric at metrocast.net sent:

> I personally tend to think, from personal experience, that any BIOS
> update scheme intended to run from within Windows is a bad one.  My
> experience is that Windows-based BIOS update utilities have a very high
> probability of failure.

Seconded.  I've also discovered that for whatever reason the presence of
certain cards (such as a
Creative X-Fi PCI sound card) makes certain Windows-based flashing utilities
(like ASUS Update) in
certain motherboards perform a corrupt flash, every time - so even if you have
a backup of your
BIOS, it doesn't help, because you can't flash it from Windows anyway, every
attempt to re-flash it
during that session will end in an error, and as soon as you reboot, you won't
be able to boot ever
again.  Combine that with *soldered* flash chips in some motherboards, and you
end up having to send
the entire motherboard back to the manufacturer to have them fix it.

One thing I can say about Intel is they successfully worked around this by
providing some sort of
temporary storage space for the new BIOS data to be stored so that the Windows
flash software simply
preloads the new BIOS to that area, reboots the computer, and then the BIOS
updates itself pre-boot
in a very reliable way.

Of course EFI was supposed to solve all this, but we are crawling (at best)
toward adoption, with
only Apple on-board in any meaningful way...

- Nate