On Sat, Jul 22, 2000 at 09:26:49AM +0200, Peter Stuge wrote:
> I'm not going to buy an UPS just because I
> want to upgrade my modem. Instead I'm going to risk the FlashROM being
> destroyed or only half-updated. I feel comfortable with this because I know
> how to take apart the modem and replace the ROM, but if I hadn't known that I
> would instead have wanted the manufacturer to add some sort of mechanism to
> the upgrading process that would withstand even a power outage. This can of
> course be done. (By downloading the new firmware to a temporary memory in
> the modem and then programming the FlashROM from that temporary memory, the
> entire modem being backed by neccessary batteries (or whatever) to make sure
> that the programming process will finish before the modem shuts down in lack
> of power.) However, I also realize that this would be pretty costly for the
> manufacturer to do and therefore it's (unfortunately) not all too likely to
> happen.
Read through the manual for your modem, and if it's not crappy, it will
have methods to let the user fix a bad firmware flash. Without costly
RAM and backup batteries.
There are simple things (from one external ISDN terminal I know) like
having an emergency firmware in ROM that is activated by a special
powerup sequence. It will then set the connection to a specified speed,
wait for a new firmware upload and flash that.
No big deal, you just have to get along without AT commands for
updating. Similar things exist for at least some motherboard BIOSes
which have a write protected boot code which can load and flash the BIOS
from floppy without needing the rest of the BIOS to work.
IDE drives have nothing like that?
-- Andreas E. Bombe <andreas.bombe@munich.netsurf.de> DSA key 0x04880A44 http://home.pages.de/~andreas.bombe/ http://linux1394.sourceforge.net/- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sun Jul 23 2000 - 21:00:20 EST