Installing a new BIOS on a Dell Computer

Theodore Papadopoulo Theodore.Papadopoulo at sophia.inria.fr
Sat Dec 19 22:57:14 UTC 2009


Aaron Konstam wrote:
> On Thu, 2009-12-17 at 12:57 -0500, Gene Heskett wrote: 
>   
>> Do a cold start and repeatedly hit the del key (or whatever it shows as the 
>> magic key on the bottom of the screen as it completes the P.O.S.T. procedure) 
>> to get into the motherboards bios.  At least the del key is the trigger for 
>> the bios on my motherboard.  This will take you into the bios configuration 
>> for your motherboard.  On my box, right arrow to highlight the next to last 
>> entry & hit enter.  There should be an option to self-update the bios there.
>>     
> Well here is the scoop. On all Dell machines you get into thee BIOS page
> by hitting F2. And indeed the next to last entry in POST. But there is
> no option in POST to change the BIOS. A simple method to change the BIOS
> on a Dell machine was described in a previous post using the Dell repo.
> Once that is installed it takes about 1 minute to change the BIOS
> without rebooting the machine. Of course you have to reboot the machine
> to use the new BIOS. I went from BIOS A03 to A11, but the bad news is I
> still can't turn on hyper-threading which was the point of the whole
> excelsior. What a bummer.
Yes the DELL bios repository for linux is clearly not up to date.
The HDR file can in theory be extracted from the exe file.
In linux, the firmwaretool has an option to extract the hdr...
Unfortunately, this does not work for me (x86_64), but you may have more 
luck.
Looking at the sources, it looks like ome way would be to use dosemu on 
the exe file.

Hope this is of some help.

     Theo.




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