OK, this post is just for nerds; specifically nerds that have an ASUS EeePC 900A that they want to flash the BIOS on. I’m only posting this so that if they run a Google search for tips on how to do this, I can save them from some of the problems I ran into. I’ll start with what to do, then give the backstory:
- Format a USB drive as FAT (AKA FAT16, but not FAT 32, that won’t work!)
- Find the BIOS file on the ASUS website, and name it 900A.ROM (the all caps is necessary, so don’t give it a lowercase extension)
- Plug the USB drive into the port on the left side of your computer- it doesn’t seem to work if it’s on the right side
- Reboot and hit Alt-F2 when the POST screen comes up to start the BIOS Update
- Profit!
OK, you might not profit, but you should get an updated BIOS.
Here’s the backstory:
I was trying to switch my 900A over to use Windows 7. I’ve run it as a Hackintosh and with a few different flavors of Linux. I was going to roll with it as an XP machine, but had problems finding drivers, and decided that Windows 7 might have better hardware support. Well, I was right, and it installed and runs perfectly (even Aero, but if you haven’t upgraded to 2GB RAM like I did, that may not work). The problem was that when I set it up as a Hackintosh, I had to downgrade the BIOS to 301 or some similar old revision, and I’ve read that battery life is greatly improved with a newer BIOS. So I downloaded the latest BIOS Update utility off the web, ran it under XP SP3 compatibility mode (after installing the ACPI service), and found that it simply didn’t work. I suspect that the BIOS I had was so old, that it didn’t allow the BIOS update utility to work. So I then tried downloading a new BIOS off the ASUS website and flashing, but ran into issues with improperly formatted USB drives, lowercase filenames, using the wrong port, using an SD card instead of a USB drive, etc. The process works great, it’s just that the 900A is very particular about how the BIOS needs to be updated. Hope that helps!