What To Do When an Advised BIOS Upgrade Is Bad? 467
Bomarc writes "Twice now I've been advised to 'flash the BIOS to the latest,' once by a (major) hard drive controller maker (RAID); once by an OEM (who listed the update as 'critical,' and has removed older versions of the BIOS). Both times, the update has bricked an expensive piece of equipment. Both times, the response after the failed flash was 'It's not our problem, it's out of warranty.' Given that they recommended / advised that the unit be upgraded, shouldn't they shoulder the responsibility of BIOS upgrade failure? Also, if their design had sockets rather than soldering on parts, one could R/R the faulty part (BIOS chip), rather than going to eBay and praying. Am I the only one that has experienced this type of problem? Have you been advised to upgrade a BIOS (firmware); and the upgrade bricked the part or system? If so, what did you do? Should I name the companies?"
Yes (Score:5, Interesting)
Do a public service and let us know (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Do a public service and let us know (Score:5, Insightful)
Corporations are not people; they do not care about you, nor should you truly care about them.
The only thing corporations are concerned about are their bottom line; if doing something helps them profit, they'll do it. If doing something HURTS their bottom line (such as, oh, I don't know, paying taxes), they'll avoid doing it as best as they can.
Any example you might provide to prove otherwise is only an example of image control, a calculated effort to improve their standing in the eyes of their consumers.
Bottom line: report what corporations do. If it's bad, it'll help your fellow consumers avoid being screwed over. If it's good, it'll steer them towards companies that care enough about their image to not be total dickbags.
Re:Do a public service and let us know (Score:5, Insightful)
When corporations do not put out quality products or keep their customers happy, they end up being bankrupt corporations.
Ummm...or end up getting bailed out with our tax dollars while the corporate upper management that drove said company to bankruptcy in the first place walks away with more money than they paid the entire bottom 80% of the employees over 10 years. Or in many cases only the second part...*cough* Nortel *cough*...
Companies today don't look at how to make great products or keep their customers happy. Their multi-million dollar salaried CEOs simple look at how to get their bonuses triggered no matter how bad it screws up the company. That and figuring out which politicians to pay off and which lawyers to hire to kill off any potential competition.
Hell if someone offered me millions of dollars to drive a healthy company into bankruptcy I'd be tempted to take it. Wouldn't you?
Re:Do a public service and let us know (Score:4, Informative)
I'm intending to purchase a motherboot that's supported by coreboot so I don't have to deal with UEFI
Why? What's wrong with UEFI that you need to replace it with coreboot (which just so happens to have a UEFI payload [coreboot.org])
Re: (Score:3)
It's unnecessary, just launch the kernel
Which kernel? I hope you mean bootloader. UEFI actually improves the bootloading experience such that installing grub and Windows concurrently won't keep fighting for the single MBR entry - it natively supports multiple registered bootloaders. It's also necessary for using 3TB+ boot drives due to limitations in the MBR scheme.
It's a lot a new code and not well tested.
That's an implementation detail, not a problem with the concept itself. Hopefully it'll improve over time. I'd still generally trust it over coreboot which voids the warranty.
It has too many features, doing thing which firmware really has no business doing.
Linux act
Re: (Score:3)
Wow, if you call UEFI new, I have to tell you, Linux 3.0 is new as well. UEFI has been around for years now. In fact, your motherboard probably runs it without you knowing - Intel has shipped UEFI only BIOSes for years with their new chips (prior to the Core Duo era). Sure, most of them run the legacy BIOS payload, but it's been around for a long time now.
Nevermind that a certain fruity company has been using it exclusively (and publicly) in their PCs for 7 odd yea
Re:Yes (Score:5, Informative)
System: Dell [dell.com] PE 1950; critical update for the BMC controller.
Re: (Score:2)
I've upgraded a number of LSI RAID controllers. Sometimes you can't skip intermediate levels, so if your firmware was way out of date that could be the problem. You also need to use the latest version of their tools.
Re:Yes (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Yes (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes - buy another is definitely going to make you buy one of their products again.
Just tell them that you will look at competitors. And there are a few around to select between.
Re:Yes (Score:5, Interesting)
I tell anyone who is considering a serious deployment of hardware RAID that they should buy two of the cards from day one, to have one in a backup server. Then you can run experiments on unrecognized drives or firmware updates on the backup. Also, if something fails on the main server, it increases the odds you'll be able to get to the data if it's still intact. Needing spares around is unfortunately part of the overhead of having this sort of hardware.
RAID controllers are pretty low volume products compared to a lot of other computer parts. And the problem where a new drive doesn't work with an old controller is depressingly common too. You could just as easily run into this same issue with any other RAID hardware. LSI at least does keep updating things. I have a drawer full of old RAID cards that stopped being useful mainly because the manufacturer gave up on updates.
Ever since 3ware was assimilated by LSI, there aren't many viable alternatives to them, if you must have hardware RAID. The only good reason to prefer it over software RAID nowadays, where you can move the drives anywhere and read them, is that booting is preserved in more failure cases. It's easy to let the boot area of a software RAID1 volume be mismatched.
Re:Yes (Score:4, Informative)
areca
Re:Yes (Score:4, Informative)
Or, you know... Use RAID how it's intended: To guard against disk failure. It's never a replacement for backups.
RAID is for availability of the system, not for keeping your data safe.
Re:Yes (Score:5, Insightful)
LSI at least does keep updating things
I admire your optimism, sir. Sure, the updates brick his controllers, but at least they come often. It's that glass-is-half-full spirit we don't see enough of these days.
Re: (Score:3)
No, this is the well known 'glass is empty but some day the guy pouring won't miss the target' brand of optimism.
Re:Yes (Score:5, Informative)
This is one of the many reasons I order Dell servers.
One of the others being that their next-business-day 5 yr warranty really means next-business-day.
Re:Yes (Score:5, Interesting)
I work for an organization that has a large number of Dell servers, all of them with 5-year support contracts: a mix of 4-hour and next-business-day. In my experience, Dell have never, ever, ever solved an issue within the specified period of time. They also frequently refuse to replace failing parts until after they've actually failed (which AFAIK is a breach of the support contract), and they once told me that six DIMMs were a “large order” that would take a week to fill (after I'd already spent a week just getting them to agree that they needed replacing). They simply don't give a shit. I've had far better experiences with HP, but they also far more expensive.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Their support might be inconsistent between regions (or time). I've had the opposite experience; disks replaced based on SMART reporting a imminent failure, big SCSI disks replaced next day and so on. I've been less impressed with HP, and SGI (several weeks to deliver a disk for a relatively new system). But then again, this was a few years back, and in Norway (Dell support subcontracted to a local provider), so your mileage may vary. These days I have less advanced hardware and do repairs myself, with impe
Re:Yes (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3)
I used to build my own servers but it really takes so much more time specing it out, checking for known issues and validation that with the purposed hardware configurations that I can't really save any money on it compared to buying a Dell or HP.
I can't stand dell servers, they are rock steady but it seems that as soon as you put the name dell on it, it slows way down. It's the same with the few HP servers I have dealt with. But in order to get the same reliability out of a fresh build, it consumes so much
Re:Yes (Score:4, Interesting)
Present each physical disk as an individual volume via the raid controller. I've done this with the IBM ServeRAID controllers in 2 x3650 M3 machines we used for proxy servers. The WebGUI firmware configuration allows 1 disk in a volume.
For the HP servers, the same should apply, but I have no experience with them.
Re: (Score:3)
Most hardware RAID controllers can be configured as a pure passthrough. That makes them trivial to replace, but reliant on well configured software RAID or backup. Many "budget" configurations for "small office" hardware have had horrible RAID controllers, especially the "hardware RAID" controllers that actually do much of their work with your system CPU and require system resources, just to be advertised as "RAID" servers. And I'm afraid that LSI and their closely related label MegaRAID have been consiste
Re:Yes (Score:5, Informative)
As usual Slashdot posters don't mention where they are, but in the UK you would still be able to get the controller fixed or partially refunded (plus possibly costs incurred due to having to switch brand) thanks to the Sale of Goods Act. Doesn't your country have any consumer protection from douchbag vendors?
Re:Yes (Score:5, Insightful)
We protect the vendors from consumers, around here.
Re:Yes (Score:5, Funny)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Yes (Score:5, Insightful)
Wait, wait, wait. A BIOS flash should (almost) completely erase the BIOS, then reprogram it.
Are you telling me that some companies use incremental BIOS upgrades? And why?
This is particularly worrying to me, as I have a SuperMicro L8i SAS controller I just installed in my main machine, and LSI is apparently behind the chipset.
Re:Yes (Score:4, Informative)
The only thing you should need the BIOS flash for is to boot from a RAID. I was assuming if he bricked the controller then it is also the RAID firmware, since otherwise you can boot from a rescue disk and run lsiutil to rewrite the BIOS flash.
The problem with skipping intermediate versions is that the on-disk format can change (more new stuff in metadata, for example). Each firmware rev only knows its own version and how to update from the previous version.
Re: (Score:3)
It's not shortsighted, I'm afraid. It's a function of a very limited, proprietary interface to the motherboard, limits on available board space for circuit traces and connectors, limits on cost for those connectors, limits on available valid signals from existing standards such as PCI and PCI-E and SATA and SCSI and SAS, and limitations on the very small amount of "flash" storage allocated for this critical information. Extensibility is a poor second or third goal behind physical reliability, and cost. Inve
Re: (Score:3)
"Dell". Well, there's your problem. Hindsight is 20/20, but if there's any chance at all you can move away from Dell, I would strongly consider that. You always have to balance short term expense with long term maintenance costs.
I can't speak for the RAID controller since I don't have experience there, but this response is really inexcusable.
Some companies do this: Create a public site/page somewhere and post a detailed story of how and what happened. Usually that gets a response from the company to mitiga
Re: (Score:3)
Nonsense. Dell's Pro Support is reasonably good, especially once you get past the first line.
The major problem I have had with Dell is their insistence on doing fast model upgrades and giving lower-quality support on superseded hardware SKUs; not to mention their lousy habit of upgrading the hardware but continuing to use the same model number in their catalogue.
Re:Yes (Score:4, Insightful)
Anyone see what is wrong with this?
Yes. What is wrong is that you deleted important context and qualifiers.
Re: (Score:3)
I never got those commercials. It was a stoner guy talking about how excited he was about a dell. Then they had those interns who were event too clueless to check if someone was in the room before they turned out the lights talking about how impressive dell support was.
Do people seriously go to the local stoner for advice on computer purchases? Do people seriously look for the least smart person in the room to ask about the quality of services a company provides? I would dismiss it as an apple thing only it
Re:Yes (Score:5, Informative)
What's the failure mode on each of {the BMC, the PERC}? I have some experience handling failures of this nature.
In particular, it's been my experience that on some Dell models of that generation, if you update the BMC firmware without updating the NIC firmware as well, the BMC will fail to be reachable on the network. Fortunately a NIC F/W update fixes this readily enough.
I wish they told you that.
[Too lazy to log in.]
Re: (Score:3)
Re:Yes (Score:4, Informative)
Also, do you think that they (the manufacturer) is going to say (or admit) or have a warning that says: "66% of the people that applied this critical update bricked their system" ??
As for "OMGWTF PONIES! CLICK HERE"; there is a radical difference between "critical by manufacturer" and "ponies"
Good Samaritan Laws (Score:5, Insightful)
My main concern is this: If the manufacturer gets punished for failing to properly support out of warranty hardware, they'll just stop altogether. Too many manufacturers will already refuse to talk to you about out of warranty equipment.
Since they tried to help, I'd prefer not to see them punished for this mistake. Think of it like good samaritan laws: They protect a person who stops to offer aid to the injured, from being sued.
My other thought is that perhaps there was some hidden problem that something in the update triggered. Updates often have new functionality, or may write to memory not used before, so it isn't too hard to imagine them tickling an existing bug. For a car analogy, imagine you bought a used car from a friend and complained that it shook horribly at 75, but since your friend never went over 65 he never noticed when the tires and alignment deteriorated to that point.
Finally, I'm appalled that they don't make old firmware versions available. That would be the appropriate response to your problem. Hopefully you can find someone helpful who has the old firmware around, either inside or outside the companies. Definitely appropriate for people to be warned that these updates can cause problems.
Re: (Score:3)
You really cannot trust such devices in production environment and repurposing for testing would fail because you might run into issues installing current software on that hardware as it's not officially supported.
Don't test with obsolete hardware.
If your plan was to run linux on them, why did you bother with BMC updates, just leave it unconfigured. Yes, it'll flash ugly orange error messages, but you know those are unneccessary and you'll r
Re:Yes (Score:5, Insightful)
Why on earth are you repurposing ~7-10 year old server hardware?.
I don't believe that just because it's old it should be thrown away. The speed is comparable with "modern" (current) equipment, the maintiance cost is less. I'm tired of "Oh, this is the latest, you must have it." I don't fall for that marketing hype, it's a shame that so many do.
Re: (Score:3)
Your server equipment, as you've discovered, wasn't built to last a decade. I know it's tragic and it grates against your middle aged soul, but that's how it is. You want to keep it, that's fine, but don't expect it to turn on tomorrow and when it doesn't accept it.
You've already said the raid controller was starting to fail, it's massively past the point where anyone sane is going to warranty it for any price you'd accept paying so you were on your own. You tried to fix the raid controller and it finished
Re: (Score:3)
Why on earth are you repurposing ~7-10 year old server hardware?
Failure rates exhibit a bath-tub curve. I have yet to be convinced that hardware that has been running with no issues at all for 7 years is more likely to exhibit sudden death than brand new hardware. And yet I keep meeting people who insist on replacing anything over 3 years old with new kit that flakes out within a few weeks.
Re:Yes (Score:4, Funny)
As for "OMGWTF PONIES! CLICK HERE"; there is a radical difference between "critical by manufacturer" and "ponies"
The Brits that recently are outraged about the ponies in their Hamburgers might disagree...
Re:Yes (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't mean to be a knob but I think the fault doesn't particularly lie with the vendor.
I view it differently. The vender advised the work. If I called up Toyota and asked advice about something for my 10 year old truck*, while it might be out of warranty if their advice resulted in major damage I think they should be liable for something.
Your advice seems to be along the lines of 'buy hundreds of thousands of dollars of equipment every year to replace equipment that is still functional solely to keep the warranty up'.
That's not good for the company's wallet, the environment, etc...
*Not that old yet, but still
Responsibility (Score:4, Insightful)
There is a degree of truth in what you're saying. He does shoulder responsibility here.
On the other hand, what the vendors have done is childish, at best. They have suggested he do something to the hardware, they participated (wrote the update), and when the metaphorical window broke, they ran like miscreants. Their mothers should really give them a firm talking to and send them to apologize.
Re: (Score:3)
No. "[Dell] listed the update as 'critical,' and has removed older versions of the BIOS". That's not the work of some mere phone support peon.
Re:Yes (Score:4, Insightful)
This poster is correct. These companies need to be named so that other folks don't get screwed by them. Case in point i have a SAMSUNG 32 inch tv. It started turning itself on and off, so i called the company and found out they lost a class action suit and had to send a tech to your home to fix the problem. Hmm did SAMSUNG call me or even send a letter about this? NO. The SOB's need to be told on period!
Sure Name Them (Score:2, Interesting)
I found updating a motherboard's BIOS from Windows is as safe as Russian roulette. I found most motherboards have a SPI bus connector. You can make a parallel port to SPI adapter and save a bad flash.
What you're really asking... (Score:5, Insightful)
is what the legal status of their "recommendations" is and whether you ought to sue them.
The tried-and-true andwer to that is: Ask a lawyer. I'm quite sure it can and does swing either way depending on local laws and any number of details you haven't provided.
Re: (Score:2)
Might be helpful to record the phone call where they told you to upgrade the BIOS, also.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
If you want to record phone conversations you simply have to state that the conversation may be recorded for quality control purposes. If the other party doesn't hang up or object then that is implied consent.
Re:What you're really asking... (Score:4, Interesting)
So if a company notifies me that my call may be recorded, does that count as two party consent if I want to record that call?
hello, bob! (oblig. xkcd) (Score:5, Interesting)
http://whatif.xkcd.com/16/ [xkcd.com]
Name the products (Score:3)
Never made a brick but (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Consider it a (technology) life lesson (Score:2, Interesting)
Don't buy hardware that can be bricked by flashing the BIOS. In this modern day and age there's just no reason for it, especially not for a price anyone would call "expensive".
Dual BIOS setups are ideal, but the ability to backup the current BIOS in case it needs to be rolled back is a must reguardless.
Re: (Score:2)
Don't buy hardware that can be bricked by flashing the BIOS.
Unfair statement; this was a situation where firmware came out later, and also almost all hardware (video cards, hard disks, network cards, motherboards, etc) has flashable firmware. Even if you have a backup of the BIOS, that cannot always save you -- like a backup of a video BIOS when the videocard can't work because it's BIOS is borked so that the screen is always black.
Re: (Score:2)
A true bricking BIOS update will trash the system so badly you can't reach any backup BIOS. By definition, if the machine is still functional enough to allow reverting the BIOS update, you didn't really brick it.
Re:Consider it a (technology) life lesson (Score:5, Interesting)
I think the most 'robust' anti-brick motherboard I've ever seen had two bios chips - and a hardware switch selecting which one was active. The active one was rendered read-only, you could only flash the inactive one.
To update the machine you'd flash the inactive, power down the system, flip the switch, power back on and hope it worked*. If it worked, generally you just trucked on on 'B' instead of 'A', in case there was something hidden borked that you didn't find for a while. If the update was borked you simply powered down again and flipped the switch back.
*Like with any bios update...
Re:Consider it a (technology) life lesson (Score:5, Informative)
You are thinking of Gigabyte motherboards. Dual-BIOS has been standard for over a decade on those.
Re: (Score:3)
Name names (Score:5, Interesting)
I generally exercise some degree of distrust towards computer manufacturer recommendations when my product is no longer under warranty and their legal team likely has them relatively well protected against your situation, but I'd definitely name names. Send a note to the Consumerist, find a few execs and contact them directly. It may be legal, but it's a dishonest approach for those companies to take. It doesn't cost you much time and energy to bring unwanted attention to the companies and that attention is sometimes enough to suddenly get your components replaced. It won't cause systematic change, but at least you're better off.
Not one to miss an opportunity for a car analogy: if a critical recall fix bricked your ride, I think most everyone would agree it is the manufacturer's responsibility to make things right even if the vehicle is out of warranty. Of course, there's obviously more regulation involved and a more direct correlation to physical safety in the case of cars (i.e., you are putting yourself at risk of bodily harm if you choose to disregard the recall fix).
Don't fix it if it aint broke (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Right! That's why I hold on to Netscape Navigator 1.0.
Ummmm, no (Score:5, Informative)
That is not at all the case. BIOS/firmware/driver updates/upgrades can potentially do four things for a working system:
1) Add new features. Many products get new features as their life goes on. My desktop board, an Intel, has gotten a number of new BIOS features during its life. When you update the code that runs something, no surprise that code can add features.
2) Improve performance. Sometimes, a faster/more efficient way of doing something is discovered. It takes an update to make that happen. I remember a big one back in the day with 3com switches. A firmware update provided a major improvement in through put and CPU usage.
3) Fix a bug that you haven't hit yet, but could. This is why you'll see updates tagged as urgent. Just because you never hit a bug that got discovered, doesn't mean the bug isn't there. So you want to get it fixed, BEFORE you hit it. There have been firmware updates that fixed some nasty ones, like data corruption with SSDs. Some people never got hit, but that doesn't mean the update wasn't a good idea.
4) Security issues. Same deal as with the bugs, just a different kind of bug. If a security issue is discovered, it'll take a patch to fix it and the system will be working before the patch.
The "Don't fix it if it ain't broke," really is not a valid ideology for systems administration.
Re:Ummmm, no (Score:4, Insightful)
In cases 1 and 2, if you don't need the new features or the extra performance, your system "ain't broke".
In cases 3 and for, your system "is broke".
So yeah, in Systems Administration the rule still is "If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
Why are you flashing these devices? (Score:2)
Why are you flashing these devices?
The only "critical" firmware upgrade is one which will - or at least has a fighting chance of - fixing an issue you are actively experiencing.
You should flash new stuff out of the box as they (Score:2)
You should flash new stuff out of the box as they can be quite behind.
Re: (Score:3)
Yeah, that's fair. But these devices aren't out of the box, they're out of warranty.
Re: (Score:2)
Why not just desolder the chip... (Score:2)
... and solder a socket in?
Re: (Score:2)
A SMT chip with 30 mil leads? Good luck with that.
It can be done but you need really, really special tools. As in a microelectronics lab.
Re: (Score:3)
These really aren't hard to do. I can take one off in under a minute, and I'm not even that good at it. SMT stuff is nowhere near as scary as people make it out to be.
Re: (Score:2)
Name the products, please (Score:2)
I think it's best if the original author would please name the particular products.
Re: (Score:2)
Not a bad idea. I'm rather curious myself. Was it flashed with a Windows executable? Or from a boot disc? USB flash drive or cd-r?
Re: (Score:3)
For the Dell system - Windows exe (for the BMC upgrade, listed by Dell as "critical")
For the LSI it was a boot disk
However: the question is about the failure -- when advised to upgrade, and the upgrade fails what to do then.
Because It Froze! (Score:2)
A Crucial consumer SSD (yeah I know, not a CPU) stopped, instantaneously.
Answer from Crucial: "Update Firmware". Updating involved the consumer understanding how to use cryptic commands in various states of the pre-boot process on a 2nd machine running Windows with wording no consumer would have ever likely understood and then used in a command line.
Companies who sell things like this without having adequate software and instructions do not DESERVE TO BE SUPPORTED by consumers.
Intel BIOS (Score:2)
I have never had a problem since switching to using only Intel boards with Intel bios. The upgrade process usually goes quite well (I've probably flashed 100 or so Intel boards over the past 3 or 4 years) and if there is ever a problem, it automatically rolls the changes back. Out of that 100 or so bios flashes, 0 have been bricked. That being said, when it comes to consumer grade boards, especially when they're out of warranty, I just assume I'm on my own and if something like that happens, its off to EB
Re: (Score:2)
You do know Intel is getting out of the mobo biz, right?
I've really only found it necessary to flash a mobo BIOS once in the past 10 years or so. It made my hands sweat. Not going to do it again if I can avoid it at all.
I once had to move a socketed BIOS chip to a other (Score:2)
I once had to move (hot swap) a socketed BIOS chip to a other board that also had a socketed BIOS to re flash after it failed and it worked when I put it back in to the first board.
Does the card / board have an bios recovery mode? I did that a few times on laptops that where not booting and was able to fix most of them.
They don't make chips with pins (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Sockets are unreliable too.
Warranty (Score:2)
If it is out of warranty, then of course you're the one at fault. Since it's out of warranty, it's on you to see what the firmware does and make the decision on whether or not to flash. Either way it's all on you to deal with the consequences.
You nearly always have the option of purchasing extended warranties for "critical" equipment. If it is really that critical, why didn't you replace it at the end of its warranty period?
Thinkpad T500 adventure (Score:3)
I have a Lenovo Thinkpad T500 brick that I made this way three months ago. I was running into a few weird Windows problems--everything was fine on Linux--and "upgrade the BIOS" was a stock troubleshooting suggestion. After a decade of happy Thinkpad ownership I didn't think this was risky. On the first reboot the update did something to fry the TPM chip. It worked fine before, never again afterward. Boots hung for about 10 minutes as the BIOS tried to talk to it, I stopped that only by disabling it there. And then the next week the computer stopped POST altogether. The laptop had been running fine for 3 years at that point. I've seen a few similar reports at the Lenovo forums; it's not just me. The only people who resolved this were still under warranty, the rest of us haven't considered it cost effective to pay for a fix.
I tried to jump two major point releases at once here, from 1.20 to 3.24 [lenovo.com]. My guess is that QA wasn't done on this much of a jump at once. Maybe 1.X->2.X->3.X or some other two step sequence would have worked. The Thinkpads have been disappointing is several ways recently, so I can't really say this surprised me.
What makes them 'critical'? (Score:4, Insightful)
I have some Thinkpads around here and it seems there's a firmware update every few months. But if you read the 'what's new' it's usually something stupid like "Old version updated to support new model xxxxxx" which I don't even have. Or worse "Corrected typo in BIOS menu."
Before I flash anything I'd like to know why and under what scenario, if any, it's necessary.
Only upgrade firmware if you have nothing to lose (Score:4, Insightful)
It is possible to unbrick! I did it before (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm too far down for this comment to really matter, but in general, it is possible to unbrick a failed BIOS flash. The reason is that already for some time all (or maybe almost all) manufacturers have two parts of the BIOS - one that gets updated, and a second part that never does, or maybe can't. The second part (actually it is the first), only has very rudimentary software. It can read floppy disks, but not much more than that. The idea is exactly that you can recover from a failed flash.
That means that to recover, you need to get the right program into a floppy, with the right BIOS on it. You then boot into this special flash mode, which often means pressing some key combination. I've done it on an LE1700 that I bought of e-bay, and I'm pretty sure you can do it on almost any computer.
In some more modern BIOSes you don't need a floppy, but can do it with a USB stick.
I'm too lazy to do a thorough search for the exact procedure, but here are two good links that I found:
http://www.mydellmini.com/forum/dell-mini-10v/18080-how-unbrick-mini-10v-using-floppy-drive.html [mydellmini.com] (this will work also on other computers, I think)
http://www.wikihow.com/Reflash-BIOS [wikihow.com]
Easy, you should not be the first one ... (Score:3)
On top of that make an internet research about the upgrade.
Honestly: if you are in a corporate environment there is no reason _inside_ to upgrade stuff, regardless what reason is given by the vendors, except in very rare cases. (E.g. girewalls etc. are protecting you, so how should a security flaw _inside_ be a _serious_ problem?)
With inside I mean the computers/hardware inside of your corporate network.
What I want to say: judge if an upgrade is so serious you need to install it immediately.
Make a google/internet research what others say about it. If possible wait until you get enough google hits. Likely you only get hits if something went bad with the upgrade. So chose your timeframe.
German companies, I mean big ones, but its true for smaller ones as well, e.g. never upgrade to a new Windows version until the one they are currently running is _failing_ (not no longer supported, but: _failing_).
Of course this approach does not work, e.g. if a BIOS or firmware upgrade needs to be done for your gateways (routers to the outside) or similar.
In such cases obviously you need a backup. A replacement router from a different vendor, another RAID controller or another set of harddrives, what ever you do.
I remember an online game where suddenly there was a new TeamSpeak client available. Lots of people upgraded, with the result that the server rejected the connections, as the server was old and outdated. I keep my TS client as it is and only upgrade when the server rejects me because my client is to old (and I install the new version into a new folder so I can run both at the same time)
Not enough info (Score:3)
I'm an IT pro, and I have flashed thousands of devices in my career. Hundreds of MB'a and countless HDs, cd-roms, RAID controllers, and amd network devices like WAPs. The only time I have bricked a device is when I lost power in the process. Even then, I was able to recover the device with some googling.
Maybe I've been lucky or maybe just buy H/W from good manufactures like Cisco, Dell, and HP.
The general rule to BIOS upgrades is... (Score:3)
As much as I like to upgrade like the next guy - I've experienced far more problems than fixes with most bios updates. The only time I update now is when they specifically fix a problem I'm having.
In the case of your 'really expensive' stuff or essential hardware - if it's just a security patch - get a nice $50 router with firewall and plug your device into that. No use risking or destroying a piece of essential hardware on a BIOS update that is ALWAYS a risky operation.
And shame them. Shame them publicly on reviews and on their forums. Be courteous by not using foul language or being irate - but state the facts and how they treated you. If they don't realize this is super-bad PR, then these guys likely don't deserve your business.
Re:Flashed hundreds of devices - no problems. (Score:5, Insightful)
It's you. I've flashed firmwares of hundreds of devices - motherboards, phones, video cards, embedded systems, routers, etc, and I have never once had one of them brick.
That's not a fair statement, because the specific devices and firmware versions have not yet been stated, so your statement is completely based on an assumption based solely on your experiences, which may nor may not have any relevance to this hardware in question. Thus what you're doing is known as "blaming the victim".
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Logic would dictate that if the piece is no longer functioning as desired you flash anyways as replacement is inevitable.
In other words, stop being a whingey bitch, recognise the inevitable, make informed decisions, and accept responsibility for them.
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The failure rate on many computer related things floats at some fraction of a percent. If you've only done a few hundred of them, it wouldn't surprise me that you haven't seen a BIOS failure. It's not that unlikely from a statistics standpoint, just like two bad updates in a row is unlikely--but it's surely happening to some unlucky soul.
I got a shipment of 500 motherboards once that turned out to need an update before they could be deployed, to add support for the CPUs purchased. A bit under 1% of those
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Since you listed the update as "critical", you need to balance the pros and cons of doing this type of update. While updating the OS is a requirement against vulnerabilities, updating a BIOS isn't like that(most of the time). Sometime, you just need to tell the boss, "listen, if we don't update the firmware, it's possible that we'll get that bug that will destroy our data, and if we update the firmware, it's possible that we'll get some other problem, I suggest "this" and "this" but you need to be aware of the risks."
For BIOS and firmware, generally the update isn't critical no matter what a manufacturer says, especially on equipment that's been running for years. I would't update any server hardware firmware after a year in service unless I was experiencing problems, as those servers will generally not see any operations that are not already happening - IOW, their purpose is set and they are operating fine as is. No change needed. I might monitor them more closely after such a bulletin though, and perhaps plan an earli