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What To Do When an Advised BIOS Upgrade Is Bad?
Bomarc writes "Twice now I've been advised to 'flash the BIOS to the latest,' once by a (major) hard drive controller maker (RAID); once by an OEM (who listed the update as 'critical,' and has removed older versions of the BIOS). Both times, the update has bricked an expensive piece of equipment. Both times, the response after the failed flash was 'It's not our problem, it's out of warranty.' Given that they recommended / advised that the unit be upgraded, shouldn't they shoulder the responsibility of BIOS upgrade failure? Also, if their design had sockets rather than soldering on parts, one could R/R the faulty part (BIOS chip), rather than going to eBay and praying. Am I the only one that has experienced this type of problem? Have you been advised to upgrade a BIOS (firmware); and the upgrade bricked the part or system? If so, what did you do? Should I name the companies?"
You should name the companies.
is what the legal status of their "recommendations" is and whether you ought to sue them.
The tried-and-true andwer to that is: Ask a lawyer. I'm quite sure it can and does swing either way depending on local laws and any number of details you haven't provided.
http://whatif.xkcd.com/16/
I generally exercise some degree of distrust towards computer manufacturer recommendations when my product is no longer under warranty and their legal team likely has them relatively well protected against your situation, but I'd definitely name names. Send a note to the Consumerist, find a few execs and contact them directly. It may be legal, but it's a dishonest approach for those companies to take. It doesn't cost you much time and energy to bring unwanted attention to the companies and that attention is sometimes enough to suddenly get your components replaced. It won't cause systematic change, but at least you're better off.
Not one to miss an opportunity for a car analogy: if a critical recall fix bricked your ride, I think most everyone would agree it is the manufacturer's responsibility to make things right even if the vehicle is out of warranty. Of course, there's obviously more regulation involved and a more direct correlation to physical safety in the case of cars (i.e., you are putting yourself at risk of bodily harm if you choose to disregard the recall fix).
It's been almost 4 years since I built my last box. I'm planning on building another desktop this summer and would like to know who to avoid as I'm intending to purchase a motherboot that's supported by coreboot so I don't have to deal with UEFI. If there's a motherboard vendor doing evil stuff and they're listed I would like to avoid them if I can. Here's the link for supported motherboards: http://www.coreboot.org/Supported_Motherboards
If it is working, then an "upgrade" cannot make it better. It can only be the same or worse.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
It's you. I've flashed firmwares of hundreds of devices - motherboards, phones, video cards, embedded systems, routers, etc, and I have never once had one of them brick.
That's not a fair statement, because the specific devices and firmware versions have not yet been stated, so your statement is completely based on an assumption based solely on your experiences, which may nor may not have any relevance to this hardware in question. Thus what you're doing is known as "blaming the victim".
That is not at all the case. BIOS/firmware/driver updates/upgrades can potentially do four things for a working system:
1) Add new features. Many products get new features as their life goes on. My desktop board, an Intel, has gotten a number of new BIOS features during its life. When you update the code that runs something, no surprise that code can add features.
2) Improve performance. Sometimes, a faster/more efficient way of doing something is discovered. It takes an update to make that happen. I remember a big one back in the day with 3com switches. A firmware update provided a major improvement in through put and CPU usage.
3) Fix a bug that you haven't hit yet, but could. This is why you'll see updates tagged as urgent. Just because you never hit a bug that got discovered, doesn't mean the bug isn't there. So you want to get it fixed, BEFORE you hit it. There have been firmware updates that fixed some nasty ones, like data corruption with SSDs. Some people never got hit, but that doesn't mean the update wasn't a good idea.
4) Security issues. Same deal as with the bugs, just a different kind of bug. If a security issue is discovered, it'll take a patch to fix it and the system will be working before the patch.
The "Don't fix it if it ain't broke," really is not a valid ideology for systems administration.
I think the most 'robust' anti-brick motherboard I've ever seen had two bios chips - and a hardware switch selecting which one was active. The active one was rendered read-only, you could only flash the inactive one.
To update the machine you'd flash the inactive, power down the system, flip the switch, power back on and hope it worked*. If it worked, generally you just trucked on on 'B' instead of 'A', in case there was something hidden borked that you didn't find for a while. If the update was borked you simply powered down again and flipped the switch back.
*Like with any bios update...
I don't read AC A human right
My main concern is this: If the manufacturer gets punished for failing to properly support out of warranty hardware, they'll just stop altogether. Too many manufacturers will already refuse to talk to you about out of warranty equipment.
Since they tried to help, I'd prefer not to see them punished for this mistake. Think of it like good samaritan laws: They protect a person who stops to offer aid to the injured, from being sued.
My other thought is that perhaps there was some hidden problem that something in the update triggered. Updates often have new functionality, or may write to memory not used before, so it isn't too hard to imagine them tickling an existing bug. For a car analogy, imagine you bought a used car from a friend and complained that it shook horribly at 75, but since your friend never went over 65 he never noticed when the tires and alignment deteriorated to that point.
Finally, I'm appalled that they don't make old firmware versions available. That would be the appropriate response to your problem. Hopefully you can find someone helpful who has the old firmware around, either inside or outside the companies. Definitely appropriate for people to be warned that these updates can cause problems.
Assembly is the reverse of disassembly.
I'm too far down for this comment to really matter, but in general, it is possible to unbrick a failed BIOS flash. The reason is that already for some time all (or maybe almost all) manufacturers have two parts of the BIOS - one that gets updated, and a second part that never does, or maybe can't. The second part (actually it is the first), only has very rudimentary software. It can read floppy disks, but not much more than that. The idea is exactly that you can recover from a failed flash.
That means that to recover, you need to get the right program into a floppy, with the right BIOS on it. You then boot into this special flash mode, which often means pressing some key combination. I've done it on an LE1700 that I bought of e-bay, and I'm pretty sure you can do it on almost any computer.
In some more modern BIOSes you don't need a floppy, but can do it with a USB stick.
I'm too lazy to do a thorough search for the exact procedure, but here are two good links that I found:
http://www.mydellmini.com/forum/dell-mini-10v/18080-how-unbrick-mini-10v-using-floppy-drive.html (this will work also on other computers, I think)
http://www.wikihow.com/Reflash-BIOS
You are thinking of Gigabyte motherboards. Dual-BIOS has been standard for over a decade on those.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC