Today’s post, is a bit technical I’m afraid. I have to apologise if some of you find it boring, but I think it is a useful piece of info that might help some people.
The story: I have an ASUS eee PC 900, which I bought with windows XP. I worked just fine, save from the short battery life. It supposed to last about 2 hrs, but in my case it lasted no more than an hour with the wlan turned on. While searching through forums, asking around and taking wild guesses, I decided to install linux on it, since it was supposed to treat batteries better. On a whim, I decided to go with SuSe, since I had seen it at a colleague’s computer and it looked nice.
The problem: After I had installed SuSe, I learned that the latest BIOS update, could help with my battery problem. I should say though that SuSe helped a lot, but I had to try that too. Asus supplies tools to perform the update through Windows and Xandros (the Linux that comes with eeePC) but offers little or no help with other OSes. Reading through forums, where everybody suggested all sorts of things, I reached…
The solution: You need a USB stick formatted as FAT16. FAT32 did not work! Then you will have to download the ROM file from ASUS website and rename it to something like 900.ROM (if your model is eeePC 1000, that would be 1000.ROM). Copy the ROM file to the USB stick, plug it in and restart your eeePC. While at the BIOS screen, press ALT and F2 simultaneously. This loads the built in updater. If all goes well, it should detect the USB stick, read the ROM file and start the update procedure. It didn’t take a long time, just a couple of minutes. Then, it will prompt you to restart the machine, and everything will be fine. Remember to re-enable some devices that will be turned off by the new BIOS.
PS: Needless to say that, updating the BIOS could result in damaging your machine, if something goes wrong…
The instructions remind me of an oldschool adventure game, were you have all these crazy and unrelated stuff, and have to make them work all toguether in a even crazier way…
…While it all made sense in the sick minds of the game creators ^^
Thank you for the post. I did, just a few minutes ago, follow the above process and it worked perfectly! Although my USB stick was FAT32 and not FAT16. Still worked great!
Glad to be of service. Normally, FAT32 should work just fine.I am not sure why it didn’t in my case and to be honest, as long as it worked I do not wish to find out ^^
Feel free to drop by anytime
Thank you for posting this! I have an Eee PC 900 from woot.com that wouldn’t take a 32GB SSD without a BIOS Update. I tried over and over again to update the BIOS but without any luck after waiting for hours for the netbook to never find the ROM file.
Thank you!!
I have a linux asus 900a that I am using to run an XP install other than Asus’s. I want to try to update the bios, and was looking around to find a way.
Thanks much for posting your experience on your blog.
Great Trick … it has worked like a charm on my eeePC 900 (initially using WXP and now with Ubuntu 9.04) usung a FAT32 USB Key.
Don’t forget to change the name to 900.ROM! otherwise it will not work.
Yes. Renaming the rom file is essential! For some reason it cannot see it otherwise! Gave me a hell of a scare when it could not detect it cause I hadn’t renamed it ^^
Excelent help – Thanks !!!!
Glad I helped
Thanks for the post, I too was watching my Eee pc 900 not finding the update file, once renamed to 900.ROM it updated immediately. I am running eeebuntu which is the best operating system I have found for the Eee 900 so far.
Glad to be of service
I have an EEE PC 900 , running windows XP….tried to follow the instructions.
1) downloaded all the updates that asus.com can provide
2) copied them to my USB 4g flash drive
3) re-named them all to .ROM’s
4) restarted the comp. and pressed F2 and ALT simultaneously
5) I enabled a few things that I saw
6) restarted the comp. again …and it says “USB Device Found” “Reading File 900.ROM” , but yet its taking forever and isn’t working…is this because I didn’t format to FAT16 ? (which I don’t know exactly how to do?)
—I have also recently updated my RAM to 2g
Someone Please help a.s.a.p
Thanks
-Tarek
Well, if your asus runs windows xp, boot into windows plug in your flash drive then go to my computer. Locate your flash drive, right click on it and choose “Format”. One of the available options, will be the file system. By default I think it will be on FAT32, but you can change that to FAT16.
Hope I helped.
Cheers!