G+: Spent most of this evening trying to do …

David Coles
Spent most of this evening trying to do a BIOS update on my Gigabyte BRIX after the latest kernel update caused a kernel panic on boot ( https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/1341275 ).

Turns out that doing a BIOS update is not exactly straight forward these days. No FDD, and even if there was the BIOS image is now 16MB!
Tried setting up syslinux+FreeDOS, but for some reason that refused to boot. Ended up using KVM and the FreeDOS installer to install onto a USB flash stick.

I have no idea what anyone technically skilled would be expected to do with a self-extracting executable (those things should really die) full of undocumented files:

$ ls ~/Downloads/brix-pro_bios_bxi7-4770r_f5
AFUDOS.exe  AfuEfix64.efi  flash.bat  fparts.txt  fpt.exe  HM87P.F5

At least they give you a batch file as a little bit of a hint. Really all that's needed is AFUDOS.exe and HM87P.F5. I guess AfuEfix64.efi  is a version you can run from the EFI shell (may have been an interesting alternative), though no idea why they give an alternative flash tool (fpt.exe).

Bug #1341275 “[Gigabyte GB-BXi7-4470R] Kernel panic in rtl8821ae...” : Bugs : “linux” package : Ubuntu


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