x86 bioses and eee pc woes
Just thought I'd write a few lines here to document experiences with the excellent little eee pc that arrived just before Christmas.
It was going great - I had done some preliminary investigations at getting it to run Solaris from an external disk, and posted the same to the laptop-discuss list. Garrett had suggested some ideas around getting wifi to work, and I was planning on looking into those more while I'm still on vacation.
However something happened the other day that's left me with a warm brick! I'm not entirely sure how it happened, but on a reboot, I was presented with a screen saying that the bios was corrupted, and that the system was looking for a new rom on an attached USB disk. Not having one to hand, and running on battery power anyway, I turned off the machine (thinking, that if it's managed to restart once with a corrupted bios, it'd do so again when I've had a chance to download the latest bios image)
Bad move. The machine now doesn't start at all - it doesn't even get to the bios splash screen. No combinations of:
- removing the battery and power supply and leaving it for a few hours
- hitting alt+f2 during boot to flash the bios from an attached usb disk
- pressing the 'reset' button on the bottom
So, I've logged a ticket with Asus tech support, and have dropped a mail to my reseller to see what the story is at getting a replacement under warranty - my machine shouldn't have broken, and I haven't messed with the factory-installed linux OS nor have I altered the hardware in any way.
In general, this sort of thing is what I hate about PC bioses - there should always be a way to rescue a dead machine. Something like a hardware switch you can use to boot the machine from a read-only bios that has enough smarts to allow you to flash the redundant bios chip with a fresh image, or at the very least bring the machine up to a state where you can save your data somewhere (in my case, since the SSD in the machine is soldered onto the motherboard, getting my data back isn't just a simple case of popping the hard disk!)
So, for now, I'm back to being without a laptop - oh well, it was nice while it lasted. Excellent start to 2008 - it can only get better :-) If anyone else has come across an eee pc in this bricked state with a potentially corrupted bios, I'm all ears, comments welcome!
most modern mainboards ship with dual bios. normaly it also should be possible to flash from usb.
some bioses do look for a file on floppy or usb, even if they look totally brick. take a look at linuxbios.org , oxygene did some great work to get grub2 working as a payload in the last gosoc. linuxbios is also the bios on the olpc
Posted by Jonas Lerch on January 03, 2008 at 09:55 PM GMT #
Interesting - the machine just powered on today, got through the bios screen, and then locked up within about 15 minutes of use! Jan suspects dodgy hardware, rather than the bios, but still - need to get it replaced.
Posted by Tim Foster on January 04, 2008 at 01:24 PM GMT #
Interesting - if I turn on "Boot booster" in the bios, the machine appears to lock up under load, otherwise everything works fine. Doing a load of read/write tests on the SDD to see if anything's broken. Had memtest running for about 6 hours yesterday without incident.
Posted by Tim Foster on January 06, 2008 at 06:59 PM GMT #
I got my unit home and was working my way through the book. When I got to the part about upgrading the Bios, All looked good untill I rebooted, then it asked for the new software on usb. With the screen locked up. Removing the battery and charger cleared that but now it will not do anything when I push the power button. It is now a brick.
Posted by Tom Van Norman on January 13, 2008 at 03:14 AM GMT #
Final update - it's definitely a hardware bug - when my machine warms up sufficiently, lifting the machine causes enough flex in the casing that some internal component becomes loose and I now sometimes get confetti appearing on screen, just prior to the machine locking up - it wasn't a bios problem, just dodgy hardware. Boxed and ready to RMA to Asus at the moment... I'll blog more when I get a chance to try Solaris on the replacement again...
Posted by Tim Foster on January 15, 2008 at 06:55 PM GMT #
Me too! My asus eee locked up on trying to update bios, and now only thing that worked was two little lights. Asus said same thing happend to one in their office, so they have it back to fix.
Posted by Peter Moody on January 20, 2008 at 03:58 PM GMT #