SDB:Biosflash
Flashing your bios in Linux
There is a way to update your pc's bios from Linux which is especially useful for modern computers with no stiffy drive and motherboard vendors don't think of linux as far as bios updates go anyway.
Flashrom
is available at "One Click install" The version from the hardware devel project is more up to date I built from svn at the moment thus it supported my MS-7529 board and my current H61MXE board. (see lower down in this text)
Full Instructions, a list of supported chipsets and mother boards are available at http://www.flashrom.org/Supported_hardware link and in "man 8 flashrom" man page. Please read before attempting your bios ugrade.
Warning!
This very useful utility can make your computer useless! If you do not know what you are doing, don't play with this program. Your computer will not start if the bios is destroyed. but it's most probably safer than booting your computer from usb or stiffy and manually updating the bios novices should ask for advice.
As long as you don't use options that override the safety features and you are sure that the new bios file is good you should be ok.
One thing that can go wrong is If your pc loses power during the programming opperation then You have a problem so
Don't Do it during storms or other times there is a high risk of power outages
It seems like they're concentrating more on flashrom nowadays, it now has it's own website, the old coreboot.org link is now flashrom.org. The program itself now does a thorough analysis of bios hardware, stating about my chipset "This flash part has status UNTESTED for operations: WRITE READ" and when I updated to the git snapshot of the day and built the package in my home project it was only untested for "WRITE" as was stated on the website's supported hardware list and the current "hardware" devel project's revision was only three days older, it's good to see the website is on the ball and up to date, very often the documentation is neglected over software.
If you require the latest svn revision for your computer's bios update, "click here to email me" and I'll "make it happen
- "Please visit the flashrom site,", they didn't have my msi listed but they had the macronix eerom in the by now comprehensive list.
You use this software at your own risk. It was tested on a Foxconn 6100M2MA-RS2H with an nvidia MCP51 chipset and it worked and I updated the bios on my "G31M3-L V2(MS-7529)" with a common intel "ICH7" chipset and a "Macronix MX25L4005" bios chip recently but it may not work on your mother board. And lastly there was a message asking very nicely for me to email the verbose command line output along with my motherboard model which I pasted from the output of "sudo hwinfo --bios". Two days later I received a very polite thank you.
"About Coreboot"
Formerly known as LinuxBIOS is a Free Software project aimed at replacing the proprietary BIOS (firmware) you can find in most of today's computers. It performs just a little bit of hardware initialization and then executes a so-called payload.