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Old 01-10-2007, 02:22 PM   #1
Yerp
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How do i "copy" one bios and "paste" it onto another identical machine


I have looked around for quite some time and had complete failure at finding this.

The Problem
===========
I've got a dozen or so identical IBM machines, each for whatever reason has different bios versions.
The IBM machines have bioses that cause the cd-roms to all but explode.
Cd-Rom after booting into a linux kernel does not work, read, or stop spinning.
I discovered one or two machines with a 2002 bios. This 2002 bios does not have this problem.
IBM has a bios archive that dates to 2003-2006, any version from 2003->2006 all have the problem without fail.

The Solition
============
If I can get the working bios onto all the machines with an up-to-date and thus broken bios and downgrade them to the working 2002 version. I just need to copy the working bios and paste it onto the other machines.


The Rock in the Road
====================
Of what little bios information out there for linux, I cannot find one that can copy the bios first and then flash the image I copied. What little that I found assumed I had some existing bios file, which I don't have.

Any help?
 
Old 01-10-2007, 08:13 PM   #2
David the H.
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Bios flashing is usually handled by a specialized utility provided by the system or motherboard manufacturer. They used to be pretty much OS-agnostic, fitting on a floppy and self-booting (using dos). Unfortunately, these days a lot of companies are moving towards Windows utilities. I believe these will sometimes run under wine though.

You need to search the IBM/Lenovo sites and track down the proper bios utility for your machines. I'm not familiar with IBM specifically, but these utilities almost always have a backup function to pull the existing bios first and restore it if something goes wrong with the update. You should be able to use that to get a working image you can transfer to the other machines. Just be quite sure they really are identical before you try it.
 
Old 01-10-2007, 08:31 PM   #3
Sepero
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Is it possible to read from, and/or modify the BIOS from within Linux?
 
  


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