[conspire] conspire Digest, Vol 100, Issue 13

[Tony Godshall]

On Mon, Oct 17, 2011 at 4:28 PM, Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com> wrote:
> Quoting Tony Godshall (tony at of.net):
>
>> I was able to upgrade a BIOS recently using cabextract to get the .BIN out
>> of the .EXE file and then using FreeDOS.  If the above are insufficient
>> clues for you and the search engine of your choice to figure out the rest,
>> let me know and I'll see if I can locate and make coherent my notes.
>
> My own advice to Bruce, when he posed this problem in-person at a recent
> CABAL meeting, was:  Swap in a spare hard drive for this purpose,
> install $MICROSOFT_OS on it for this purpose, flash the firmware, and
> then swap your regular hard drive back in.
>
> You really don't want ROM-flashing to go sideways in mid-rewrite, so
> extra variables are to be avoided.
>
> oI'd possible there might be a way to lob the binary blob into the ROM
> from FreeDOS.  I wouldn't know.  Bruce _claimed_ that the standard
> hardware-provided method was via a Win32 binary; whether that binary's
> unpacking and ROM-writing functions can be provided using other software
> is an interesting question that, personally, I would want other people
> to test out with their hardware, not mine.

Heh- true that.