Comment 41 for bug 422858

Revision history for this message
Eivind Eide (mokkurkalve) wrote :

Runar Ingebrigtsen wrote:
> Unfortunately I haven't been able to flash my BIOS with this new version
> yet. My problem is that it's DOS-dependent and the flashit program just
> crashed on me when running it in FreeDOS from a USB memory stick. I have
> made a request for a Windows version like former BIOS releases from
> Acer, as I dual boot Windows 7 and Ubuntu.

If the FreeDOS method fails there's an alternative (and less free) way of preparing the DOS USB stick that must be done partially on a Windows box.
1) Download a copy of WinImage (8.0 or newer). The program is shareware with a free 30 days trial limit.
2) Download the "Driver Free Disk For BIOS Flashing", drdflash.exe from bootdisk.com. It's a WinImage selfextracting floppy image, so next you open it from the Winimage menu "Open file" by selecting "All files" file type, you don't have to execute it (meaning write to a floppy disk).
3) Change the size of the image. It's a 1.44 Mb floppy image, but WinImage let you choose unconventional sizes, the biggest being 2.88 Mb. Choose that in order to get enough size to add your files.
4) Now choose "inject files" from menu and inject all the files of the DOS version of the BIOS firmware, for Aspire One it's three files. Now you should have the files of the DR-DOS OS and the firmware files in the image.
5) Save the image as uncompressed image, type called IMA by WinImage program (Do not select compressed image or selfextracting image or any other type). Call it e.g. "biosimage.IMA". You can change the extension from .IMA to .img after if you so desire.
6) Writing the image to the memory stick. This we do with dd on either Linux or Windows. If you do it on Windows you must get a copy of dd.exe. The important thing is to write it raw to the root of the device, NOT to a partition or anything. So let's say we are on Linux now; you run tail -f /var/log/messages when you inject the memorystick to be shure of the name of the device. You will erase everything on the device you write to so be shure to select the memorystick, and be shure that it's OK to erase what was on it before. On Linux the device will be /dev/sdX something, e.g. /dev/sdb. Do not write to /dev/sdX1 or anything, but directly on /dev/sdX. (If you use Widows version of dd the device could be E:\ or something, be very sure to pick the right one). Now write the image to stick as root or with sudo:
dd if=biosimage.img of=/dev/sdX
7) Now you can boot of the memorystick. Use the dir command in DOS to see that you can see your files. Then you can execute the firmware flash program. For Aspire One it was a batch file that should be executed. In my case the command was KAV10.BAT