I’ve hopefully bought a new CPU to stick in the office server. All being well, it’ll be super quick and so on.
Looking at ASUS’s website, I made sure to choose a CPU the motherboard supports. I saw it required a BOS update, so fine… that shouldn’t be hard, right?
Think again.
- Downloaded BIOS file (possible from this link)
- Downloaded FreeDOS, burnt to CDR so I could boot into a DOS like environment.
- Copied BIOS file + AFUDOS update utility to USB stick.
- Rebooted, booted off CDR, chose to run LiveCD (No Drivers)
- Then tried to use AfuDos.
- Be good – take a backup first (afudos.exe /obiosbackup.rom
- Try and install a newer one (afudos.exe /iM3N78-~1.ROM) – fails with a message like “invalid bios id in rom”. Quite unhelpful.
- I tried various different .rom file names, but no combination of motherboard (M3N78) and bios version name seemed to work.
- Eventually, Googled a LOT more, and found that there is an ‘engineering’ version of the AfuDos tool, which allows you to force the update, and ignore any stupid check….
- For the sake of it, I tried to restore the backup I’d taken, using the original afudos.exe, but this didn’t work (WTF?)
- Downloaded ‘engineering’ afudos tool (try e.g. here)
- Ran with ‘afudos.exe /ibiosbackup.rom /n’ (the /n tells it to not do the stupid check) – worked… OK.
- Rebooted
- Entered back into DOS, and ran: ‘afudos.exe /iBiosIWantToUse.rom /n
- Crossed fingers, hoped I wasn’t going to brick the stupid motherboard…
- Success.
- Reboot. Carry on life.
The ‘onboard’ ez-flash utility ASUS provide seems totally useless.
Oh well, hopefully we’ll soon have 6 cores of goodness powering Jenkins.
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