[flashrom] [RFC] Kill --force

Magnus Alm magnus.alm at gmail.com
Mon Apr 12 22:03:25 CEST 2010


2010/4/12 Carl-Daniel Hailfinger <c-d.hailfinger.devel.2006 at gmx.net>:
> On 12.04.2010 10:56, Magnus Alm wrote:
>> Thanks for the try, but the laptop shut it self down while I was
>> asleep. And it's a brick now.
>> Shit happens, first time I managed to kill a main-board in those 17
>> years I've worked with computers.
>>
>
> You can recover with a soldering iron and an external flasher (a $10
> used mainboard with parallel flash on ebay might suffice).
>
>
>> A patch that changed this output would have been better if it was
>> already in place when I tested it:
>>
>> +WARNING! DON'T DO A "flashrom -EV" ON A LAPTOP THO, SINCE IT MIGHT
>> TURN IT INTO A BRICK!
>>
>
> A better text would be:
> "Running pure erase (flashrom -E) on a laptop with shared flash is
> guaranteed to brick it. Running write (flashrom -w) on a laptop with
> shared flash has a high chance of bricking it. To recover, you will have
> to desolder the flash chip from your mainboard. You have been warned."
>
> The fact that pure write worked for you was just luck. Really.
>
>
> Every software project with the chance of bricking hardware has such
> warnings, and forums and mailing lists are filled with complaints from
> people who ignored the warnings or acted in possibly dangerous ways and
> then made a typo at the wrong moment.
> The MPlayer developers (and their software can't even brick anything
> AFAICS) simply wrote that everybody who doesn't read the manual or who
> ignores warning/error messages will be ridiculed and flamed in public.
> No idea if this is still the current policy, but it worked very well for
> them in the past. I think that such behaviour may be very effective, but
> it wouldn't be in line with our friendliness principle. If warning
> messages are too obnoxious, distributions will patch them out (see the
> various distribution patches for old cdrecord out there).
>
> This problem is fundamentally unsolvable on a technical level, and needs
> to be addressed (and hopefully solved) as a social problem.
>
> No offense intended.

No pun taken, testing such stuff is risky and I have just myself to blame.

Writing too and reading from bios worked just fine with Micheals patch tho.


>
> Regards,
> Carl-Daniel
>
> --
> http://www.hailfinger.org/
>
>

Cheers

/Magnus




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