EeePC BIOS update

September 22nd, 200903:54 pm

Trouble updating the BIOS on my EeePC 901 because the /usr/sbin/biosupdate.pl script wouldn’t use the proxy settings. There’s a way to use a USB stick. I think you download the zip archive from Asus, unzip it and copy the image to a USB stick formatted with FAT16, the image must be named 901.rom.

But you can do it without a USB stick. The biosupdate.pl script just copies the image file to a special partition and changes a proc file. Run the following as root. Best to run line by line. For me the image was called 1703.ROM and the partcode was 901.

cd /tmp
mkdir mnt
chmod 0755 mnt
mount -L BIOS mnt
rom=`find -name \*.[Rr][Oo][Mm] | head -n1`
partcode=`/usr/sbin/dmidecode -s baseboard-product-name`
cp $rom mnt/$partcode.rom
umount mnt
echo 0x030c > /proc/acpi/asus/hdps

When you reboot the EeePC will update itself, play a few notes and reboot. Make sure it’s connected to the mains.

The full script is available on the Eee User forums if you’ve overwritten yours.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 22nd, 2009 at 03:54:10 System/Localtime and is filed under Linux. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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