I made a totally stupid rookie mistake this evening.
Yesterday Nate, a co-worker, gave me one of his old servers. It’s a pretty nice box, a 3U case with a Tyan motherboard that supports dual PII/III processors.
I started playing with it this evening and discovered that it had a weird quirk. When you exited the BIOS after changing the settings, it powered off and wouldn’t turn back on until you unplugged the power supply for about 30 seconds.
Weird.
I figured it couldn’t hurt to upgrade the BIOS, so I went to Tyan’s website and downloaded the BIOS and the flash utility. I made a boot disk, booted it up and went to work. The utility even let me make a backup of the old version in case I had a problem. Nice.
Then I rebooted.
Black screen. Nothing. Dead.
Turns out that I grabbed the wrong BIOS image. The motherboard is a Tiger 100 S1832D. I managed to flash the BIOS with one meant for a Thunder 100 S1836DULAN.
Crap. Crap. Crap.
So I went to the AMI site and filled out a form hoping they can figure out what BIOS it’s supposed to be and can sell me a chip.
There is someone on eBay right now selling four of these motherboards for $50 each plus $15 shipping. Don’t really want to spend that…
Oh yay! I just found a link on the Tyan site to BIOSMan.com and ordered a new, flashed BIOS for $25 including shipping!
Man, it’s been years since the last time I had to swap a BIOS chip.
