2006-09-12T01:00:00.0000000+01:00
<p>After much fretting, I finally decided to risk booting from CD to install the 8355H BIOS. After much waiting whilst the machine hummed and harred with unreadable error messages, the screen turned blue (with gibberish) - the colour of the flash program. A progress bar counted down backwards in red, then faster in green (indicating that the update was a success), and the machine powered itself off. Restarting, it started fine!</p>
<p>Unfortunately, now I get a "PREVIEW VERSION - NOT FOR RESALE" message and a date flashing on the POST screen every time I boot, and the new BIOS still didn't allow Vista to progress past its ACPI BSOD.</p>
<p>For those of you who want to know how to flash a BIOS using a boot CD without touching a floppy drive, there is a basic tutorial <a href="http://www.bay-wolf.com/bootcd.htm">here</a>. Instead of using the floppy image provided, download a basic Win98SE floppy image from <a href="http://www.bootdisk.com/">here</a>, and add the BIOS flash utility and the new BIOS image using <a href="http://www.winimage.com/">WinImage</a>. Then use the tutorial linked above to burn using Nero, selecting the floppy image file you've created instead of using the floppy drive. If you want to be fancy, you can replace the default autoexec.bat with a new one that automagically runs the BIOS flash.</p>
<p>To those of you who are getting the same problems as me attempting to install Vista on a laptop, I'm sorry that I don't have a solution (save trying the x86 version instead - worked for me during Beta 2). I've reported the problem to MS and am waiting for a response.</p>
2006-09-12T20:26:20.5900000+01:00
2006-09-12T20:26:20.5906250+01:00
573dcf21-0143-48aa-b1e8-e4bb915fc157
The BIOS from hell has been fixed
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