September 17th, 2009 ··· andarius
I thought I would share this little tid-bit just in case some one else has the same issue I did…
I have decided to swap some hardware around as far as what is doing what. In the mix I will be moving my Via EPIA-M mini-ITX board back to duties as my firewall. One of the requirements for this however was a BIOS update so that it would boot after power loss. After some checking come to find out the BIOS I had was 1.0B and the current version is 1.16, slight gap there. So, step one is update BIOS, step two is load Endian Community and step 3 is import a backup from the running machine.
After downloading the BIOS and flash tool from Via’s site I created a floppy boot disk using an image from bootdisk.com. They have a special image just for BIOS flashing with no drivers so one has plenty of space. On booting the disk and running the Via flash tool it promptly tells me that it is only for Via motherboards with an Award BIOS then exit. Several boot images and attempts later I have had my fill. Not only did the tool come from the proper support page but the README that came with the flash utility even specifies my flash ROM as one supported. Via… you fail.
To work around this I downloaded an Award made tool for flashing their BIOS chips. While not the easiest thing to find our good friends over at Tyan have it for download. The specific page is here! I pulled version 8.31 and dumped it to the same floppy along with the BIOS file. It kindly asked me for a file name to load, if I wanted to back up the old BIOS image and to where, then updated the board. A CMOS reset and things were chugging along sweetly.
The system is now loaded with Endian Community Edition on a 4 gig CF card in an IDE-to-CF adapter. I am shooting for low power this time around. It will sport a spare Intel NIC I had for the second interface card and I hope to load the back from the current firewall some time soon.
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