Dell sucks? BIOS upgrade and OS Recovery
Working on a Dell System Workstation 670 with a raw drive. The original drive crashed and burned.
So starts the pain.
I reach for the recovery cdrom, nadda, customer doesn’t have it. So I go to Dell’s web site and 3 hours later I have an iso to burn.
Boot the newly minted cdrom.
I get some weird error about CPUID is limited. So I do some Googlefu and find that the problem might be related to an old BIOS.
Jump into CMOS and find “BIOS Version A06 (09/12/05)” ZOMG! 2005!? Back to Dell’s crap difficult to navigate web site and find a BIOS upgrade from 2006.
Downloaded the .exe, instructions say put it on the C:, run DOS and execute the .exe. Ahhh, remember raw drive, no OS!
Ok, no DOS/Windows, so it says put the .exe on a floppy (WTF!) and boot from the floppy. When was the last time you bought a Dell with a floppy drive?
Download a DOS bootable iso image! Fark with the iso and get the BIOS update .exe onto the image. Munch it, burn it, and boot it.
BIOS .exe wants r/w media! Arrgh! Stupid!
Gave up for now. Will attempt to get a bootable windows iso image and make sure it has usb drivers and put the BIOS .exe on the usb pen drive and see if I can get this to work.
I really hate Dell and windows.
The irony, debian etch netinstall boots and installs just fine. Ditto for ubuntu hardy. Go figure.