[plug] MITAC Notebook BIOS update went wrong. BIOS not coming up anymore

[Arie Hol]

At 10:05 AM 17-02-2003 +0800, you wrote:
>Sacha Schlegel wrote:
>
>>Hi Plugger
>>
>>A friend of mine just got a serious problem.
>>
>>He wanted to update his BIOS of his MITAC notebook. The update went wrong.
>>
>>The update program did say: please dont power off! and provided a menu to
a) update b) load file c) advance. The menu did not respond to any
keystrokes so we waited and waited and waited. Nothing happened. After a
while we did turn it off.
>>
>>AND turned it on again, but it did not come up. Not even the bios did come
up. And there was no possiblity to backup the old bios.
>>
>>Concret we might check if there are any MITAC dealers here in Perth.
>>  
>>
>Check the MITAC site, this happened to me and there was a diagram for a 
>dummp plug to insert into one of the ports on the back of the laptop 
>that kicked in a rescue bios type of affair.

>I had to prepare a special boot disk with the right files on it and 
>insert the dummy plug then it booted and with no video or interaction 
>re-flashed the bios. It was all on the mitac site and a couple of years 
>ago now.

The boot disk needs to have a special "autoexec.bat" file created on it
which calls up the flash utility which in turn then flashes the binary
(??.bin file) to the bios. 

This procedure will only work if the "Boot Block" of the bios is still
accessible, this should contain enough instructions to direct the system to
boot from the A: drive and run the autoexec.bat file and subsequently the
flash utility.

NOTE: 

1 - You MUST have the CORRECT "Flash Utility" to do it. 

2 - You MUST provide the correct parameters to the Flash utility in the
'autoexec.bat' file for the flasher to do it's job - you may only get one
chance.
3 - You MUST also have the CORRECT binary to do it. 

(suggest that you try and find a copy of the original binary and that way if
you only get a partial flash - it may be good enough to restore enough of
the original bios settings to get a bootable system.)

HTH

Good luck.






>Brad
>
>
>
Regards Arie

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