Anbody here know or have any experience with flashing the BIOS on an old Compaq machine? Here's what I have: an old Compaq Presario 5441 with a Gigabyte GA-5SMM motherboard. So what I want to do is flash the BIOS with the latest one that the Gigabyte site has listed. But I have heard that Compaq's can have issues with this. I don't see an updated BIOS at the compaq site. But there is one on the gigabyte site that provides support for hard drives larger than 64GB. I'm planning to turn this into a new little linux server to play with. Do y'all reckon I can just flash this with gigabyte bios like a normal flash?
If you use an uptodate version of whichever flasher you want to use, I dont see a huge problem, as it'll throw an error if it thinks its the wrong board. Give it a go. At you own risk
Xen0phobiak: thanks for the cautious encouragement. LOL! Yay it worked! And what's even better is that now I have all of the normal BIOS features and none of the stupid Compaq splash screen! Now to start re-installing slackware.
Deviate; How did you manage to update your BIOS. I have the same situation with the same machine. The only BIOS update I have found at Gigabyte has to run under windows to install. Is there another somewhere? Did you have windows installed to update the bios?
Wow...that was a while ago. I don't remember exactly how I did it, may have been under windows, but I didn't think so. If you download the F5 version of the BIOS from the gigabyte site it is an exe. You can open that exe with WinRAR and inside there are three files: an autoexec.bat, flash848.exe (this is the flash utility) and 5SMM.F5 (this is the ROM). You should be able to either 1) extract those 3 files to a floppy and then boot from it which will cause the autoexec.bat to run and flash the BIOS or 2) boot with a boot disk and execute the a:\flash848.exe and load the S5MM.F5 ROM yourself. Personally I would prefer option 2.
