On Mon, Jan 23, 2006 at 23:22:26 +0000, James Wilkinson <fedora@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > David Fletcher wrote: > > That's why it's best to flash the BIOS if an update is made available. > > The alternative point of view is that flashing a BIOS is not risk free. > If the power goes or the computer crashes while you are in the middle of > flashing a BIOS, you may have problems. Some motherboards (those with > Gigabyte Dual BIOS, for example) should be able to pick itself up and > recover automatically. Some motherboards may have just enough of an > emergency BIOS to load a DOS floppy and the flash routine (but not > necessarily PCI/AGP/PCI Express drivers, so you may be doing this in the > dark...) But if you're unlucky, you may end up with a dead motherboard, > or at least one that requires a replacement BIOS chip. If you do it a lot you can buy programmers to handle mistakes. I had one where I was lucky to have another computer around the house with a compatible eeprom and was able to hotflash the one I messed up.
