Acer Aspire One BIOS Update

[warreno]

A'ight, that is officially spooky. Still, excellent news.

[Keith Wapshott]

A'ight, that is officially spooky. Still, excellent news.

Yup!

I am now a very happy chappy

[sepharoth213]

I came across this looking for some fix for the unsupported bios crap, I just have to say that the Aspire One has an emergency bios recovery thing,
http://macles.blogspot.com/2008/08/a...-recovery.html
if you have this kind anyway. I've had to use this twice now, Windows broke my bios a couple times (but only during dual boot with Ubuntu...hmmm).

[Thaddeus Morgan]

First thing I did with my new Acer Aspire One AO532H was to wipe the drive and install UNR 9.10. It feels good never to accept a EULA. In order to upgrade the BIOS from 1.02 to 1.18, I did the following:

1. Download BIOS update files from Acer website.
2. Make note of the contents of the batch file used to update the BIOS.
3. Download the latest version of FreeDOS.
4. Install unetbookin (sudo aptitude install unetbookin).
5. Use unetbookin to create a USB start up disk for FreeDOS.
6. Copy the BIOS update files onto the USB start up disk.
7. Boot the AO532H from the USB disk.
8. Run the command found in the batch BIOS update file, modified to use absolute paths instead of relative paths.

This update procedure left my UNR 9.10 installation intact and successfully updated the BIOS using only free software.

[Vagabond112]

I've just updated my Acer notebook (Ubuntu 11.10, AMDx64) bios using unetbootin freedos bootable flash drive, prepared in advance (Kingston traveler, 2GB fat32 filesystem).

There are no instructions on Acer's website on bios updating in Linux OS for my notebook model, and Linux is not officially supported on my model. The update bios archive has only DOS, WIN32 and WIN64 stuff.

After making bootable pen drive, I manually copied the necessary files from the update bios archive. Only bios.bat and contents of DOS folder containing an image and firmware utility were copied to pen drive root.

After test boot, I dir a:\ and dir b:\ in order to check whether freedos system could see anything on my pendrive. It sees its own files at a:\ and the copied bios.batch and update bios files at b:\.

I just needed then to edit the bios.batch file manually, as suggested by Thaddeus Morgan, indicating the absolute paths to the utility and image files, adding "b:\" to dos commands contained in the batch file. Thus, the freedos system will know where to take the utility programs and where to take the new bios image.

This exercise reminded me cool old days, before mices and GUIs appearance...

Be very careful before taking a decision to update bios on you own risk using non standard methods. You should absolutely understand what you're doing and what are possible consequences...