Re: Lenovo Ideapad Y510 is Go (Continued / NEW)
BIOS and CMOS What They Are
What Flashing the BIOS Is
Originally Posted by
azteca_04
Hi, thanks for all the help you guys have provide here, its helped me with my lenovo y510, and its awsome, ok well my question is about the bios update, i updated the bios via vista de own on the lenovo web page, so i dont need to update for my ubuntu partition right? once i updated it will remaind that no matter what SO i ran, or how many times i format right? thanks for all the help wyth and HunterTompson
Yes, This that is corect. You do not have to flash your BIOS agin. The BIOS is not on the HDD it is on the System ROM chip.
On your motherboard there are two small chips that are needed to start your computer. They are cald the system ROM "Read only memory" and CMOS "Complementary metal-oxide semiconductor". The system ROM is the special memory chip that stores the BIOS "basic input/output system" programs. The BIOS is the collective name for the hundreds of tiny porgrams that tell your computer everything from what the time is to what kind of computer it is and the CMOS setup utility. The CMOS setup utility is the porgram that is running when you hit the F2 at the POST screen. The CMOS memory chip containes saved information that you selected in the CMOS setup utility such as the boot order.
When you turn on the power to your computer there is a wire that is connected to your CPU cald "power good wire". This tells your CPU to wake up. It then talks to the ROM and runs the BIOS programs to find out what hardware is connected to the PC and runs self diognostic tests. This is cald the POST "Power on self test". The POST will also look for Bootable drives in the order spesifid by the CMOS settings i.e. the GRUB bootloader on the Harddrive. If all go's well it will then give control of the coputer over to the GRUB bootloader wich will intern give control over to the OS that you choose.
The BIOS programs will be coppyed over to the RAM "Random acess memory" to preform basic tasks. One of these programs controls and maps the RAM. This is the program that had a Bug in it in the older vertion the the BIOS on all of the Lenovo Ideapad laptops. So, that is why it was taged a "Critical Update". It mite have updated other things but that is the only one Lenovo said was updated.
In the beginning the only way to change any of the BIOS programs was to change the ROM chip itself. But then there was the advent of CMOS wich alowd to save some settings in a safe way. The CMOS is volital though it requiers voltige to retain memory. To give it this voltige there is a CMOS battery. If your clock starts to loose time or every time you start you computer the CMOS setup utility settings are back to the defalt settings your CMOS battery is dead and needs to me changed. BUT now there is new system ROM cips that use Flash memory. They are cald FlashBIOS chips or FlashROM-BIOS chips. These chips can be written to inorter to update hardware compatability or fix Bugs. Changeing the BIOS programs on a FlashROM chip is cald "Flashing the BIOS".
Now that you know that the BIOS programs on the system ROM chip are the cridical software needed to start you compuer you should also know that if something gose wrong wile Flashing the BIOS your compuer will not turn on. So, when you flash your BIOS make sure you know what you are doing and DO NOT INTERUPT THE FLASHING PROSSESS.
Dring the POST if the compuer will not start and only Beeps at you or prints an error coad on the screen. Then the POST has dettected an error with one or more componets of the hardware. The error codes are some what standerdized such as 100-199 are motherboard errors, 200-299 are keyboard errors, 300-399 are RAM errors. You can find a list of the error coads (beeps and #'s) on the computer makers web sight or on the Mother board makers web sight.
Last edited by HunterThomson; August 9th, 2008 at 11:39 AM.
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