Patching the BIOS

I had to update the BIOS on a system today. We messed with it a bit Friday evening. It was put squarely in my lap this morning. I hopped on the manufacturer's page and figured out that we had already downloaded those utilities Friday.

The manufacturer wants you to use one of the following.

• Boot off the utility DVD they sent with the box and click 'update firmware'.
  
• Floppy boot disk. When is the last time you saw a floppy on a computer?
  
• Windows Utility. Great if you have Windows installed.
  
• Linux utility, Great if you have Linux installed.
  
• Some sort of USB drive thing that is supposed to let you boot the box like the floppy and patch the BIOS. This is more Voodoo than reality.
  

They would argue that they provide ample working methods for applying the patch to the BIOS. I would say that you need so many methods because none of them work more than half the time or in half the situations users have in front of them.

When I booted off the manufacturer boot DVD, the 'update firmware' choice was looking for something that I had not found on the manufacturer's web page. Solaris (the OS on the box) would not run the Linux version of the utility. The Ubuntu and Fedora live CDs would not run the utility for the lack of the same versions of C libraries. There is no Windows live CD that I'm aware of.

I had to grab a hard drive out of the graveyard (every company has one) and install Red Hat 5 on it. That is the OS the Linux utility was built for. That worked. That is a bit above the call if you ask me. Since it's my blog, I'm asking.

Friday there were three of us working on the task and we got basically nowhere. I had some sleep over the weekend and the other two had other things taking up their time. By myself, it didn't take long at all. Too many cooks I suppose.

We were held up by many typical speed bumps in the process. We had to track down a USB DVD drive so we could boot with the proper utilities because the machine only had a CD drive. No floppy, because who the hell has a floppy? I've had machines in the past that would not boot from DVDs at all. Not old machines either.  I've had machines that would not boot from the front USB, but would boot off the back USB buss.They probably just need a BIOS upgrade.