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Firmware Upgrades Creating Doorstops?
Michael Droettboom asks: "I recently purchased a Linksys WMLS11B. Nice enough unit for the money. One gotcha, though: when upgrading the firmware (past its refundable date where I bought it), my machine crashed, turning the WMLS11B into a doorstop along with it. Linksys has offered to replace the unit, but I don't want it if the box is so easily corrupted. I have always been on a strict policy of updating firmware on all my devices, but was wondering if anyone else has had experience with devices so broken as to not recover from a broken upgrade?"
If you're lucky there'll be a jtag-type port on the unit where you can reflash the memory.
:-)
If not, bring on the soldering iron and fix it properly.
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
This is consumer.. trash.
Most, if not all things made for consumers are made with this lack of quality in mind. Motherboards at least have a replaceable chip (unlike some dell models). Some high-ish quality X86 boards have 2 bioses that keep a known good copy on second chip.
You must be aware that most devives with updateable firmware also suffer this.. problem. Some older graphics cards actually had removable Bioses, as well did scsi cards.
Once device I know that does not have this problem is the stable hardware on teh Compaq Proliant servers. There's extremly stable text mode drivers along with keyboard imput and ide drivers. You update the upgradeable bioses on the hard drive. Something causes problems? Reload from cd and redo the "bios" partition.
Lucent USB wifi modules also do something similar... The driver for the host computer updates "onload" the firmware. A firmware updfate on those are as simple as telling the driver to upload this file instead of this other file.
I love IBM hardware, its always been good to me, but I've got a related story.
an x225 that was less than 2 weeks old had a motherboard failure, IBM sent a tech out who replaced the motherboard, all nice and good. However the last thing the tech did was flash the bios. Its the last thing the motherboard ever did too. The replacement motherboard was toast. (And believe it or not, it was the last x225 motherboard in the country at the time).
Either way, apparently the flash util erased the bios, but didn't write a new one. Now according to IBM there are procedures in place to stop that from happening and if it does happen, to recover, but none of that worked.
Afaik, when you first burn eeproms, you can mask off a region that can't be reburnt, thus allowing you to have recovery, but I'm guessing this didn't work on this system.
Either way, EIGHT days after the motherboard died, we had a replacement server. I must say though, this has been the only bad experience I've had with IBM support.
I use to have a funny sig, but slash cut it off, and I forgot what the punchline was.
I have a linksys BEFSR81v3 router.
I updated the firmware, and afterwards, Half-Life based games would not work. I could play for up to 5 minutes, then it would halt with an "invalid packet" message of some sort.
I searched around online, and found other people with similiar problems, and forums saying that Linksys was aware of the problem, it had to do with fragmentation of large packets.
The real problem was that their web/FTP did not have any copies of the previous firmware, so I couldn't revert.
I called up tech support. Several times. Usually, the people I was talking to had strong accents that made them hard to understand. On top of that, when I called and asked for the previous firmware, they were basically going to the FTP site themselves, and emailing me a file (that I could have easily downloaded, and was not the correct file).
I started off polite, the first few phone conversations. Several phone conversations (and two days after I first called), this is what my side of the conversation sounded like:
"I have VERSION 3 of the BEFSR81, do you understand? Yes, I have been to your FTP site, and looked all over it. I do not want the firmware for version 2 of the router. If you read its text file, it SPECIFICALLY SAYS IT WILL NOT WORK WITH VERSION 3."
Several hours later, what do I get, but yet another copy of version 2 firmware that won't work on my router.