Flash Dance

I had a pretty scary BIOS flash once. I picked up a used Dual-Opteron board/RAM/CPUs. They worked great, but I got this message basically saying that it couldn't detect the CPUs properly. I'd have ignored it, except it stopped the boot process every time.

I flashed, with a DOS booting USB stick, and it didn't make it back. A quick e-mail to BadFlash.com got me a new chip to put in, with the updated BIOS and all was well. That was a $30 tribulation, and a trial of my patience.

Recently, Fedora gives me some kind of message on boot up about IOMM32 and costing 64 MB of RAM. Apparently Vista didn't care, or just didn't tell me. Annoying, but I don't know what it means. I couldn't find the setting it told me to adjust, so I just let it go, since it didn't stop the boot sequence.

I decided last night to flash again, this time using an updated Asus Update Utility. I had to findsome 4.xx something version - newer than what was on the CD that I didn't get, and can't download, because Asus didn't even have an updated version on their support site for the board. I downloaded it from Softpedia. Yes, I know flashing from a DOS floppy is the best way to go, but dammit, I'm not getting out a floppy drive for anything anymore!

I was successful... sigh. Flashing BIOS used to not be scary for me. I used to recommend to people always flash... it can't hurt. That week without my computer, waiting for a updated chip sucked bad. I can't believe how my attitude toward something that seems like routine maintenance now makes my heart stop for a minute while I flash and reboot. Well, now I can put those udpated quad-core Barcelona chips in my board... Heh, like I really need 8 cores...