We rebooted the computer of an employee here and somehow the machine automatically flashed a bios update on there. When did this start? Seems like a good way to brick a computer to me. What if the power goes out?
Dell is reflashing the bios automatically on reboot now?
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Re: Dell is reflashing the bios automatically on reboot now?
#2Did you reboot the computer a second time to see if it flashed the BIOS again? Once is a scheduled BIOS update, possibly triggered by an administrator. Twice is more concerning...
Re: Dell is reflashing the bios automatically on reboot now?
#3If it's running Windows then sometimes BIOS updates can be delivered through Windows update.
Yes it's just as bad an idea as it seems.
Source: Dealt with it occasionally at a computer repair shop I worked at.
Re: Dell is reflashing the bios automatically on reboot now?
#4Critical BIOS updates for most Dells are now delivered over Windows Update as well as via offline methods.
https://www.dell.com/support/kbdoc/en-us/000124211/dell-bios...
Re: Dell is reflashing the bios automatically on reboot now?
#5Most firmware updates on motherboards today happen via A/B partitions, so a power failure during update is automatically recoverable on the next boot. This has been done specifically to enable automatic updates triggered from the OS, as e.g. MacOS has done for some time. The difficulty of firmware updates has become a real practical problem since the more complex firmware used today is more likely to need fixes for system stability, and support gets tired of handling a dozen cases a day that are problems already fixed in newer firmware.
Automatic firmware updates have become pretty common on hardware from big OEMs for several years now.
Re: Dell is reflashing the bios automatically on reboot now?
#6Did you reboot the computer a second time to see if it flashed the BIOS again? Once is a scheduled BIOS update, possibly triggered by an administrator. Twice is more concerning...
I am the administrator. The update worked but a heads up would be nice.
Re: Dell is reflashing the bios automatically on reboot now?
#7If it's running Windows then sometimes BIOS updates can be delivered through Windows update. Yes it's just as bad an idea as it seems. Source: Dealt with it occasionally at a computer repair shop I worked at.
I am pretty sure I have seen it on Ubuntu also.
Re: Dell is reflashing the bios automatically on reboot now?
#8If it's running Windows then sometimes BIOS updates can be delivered through Windows update. Yes it's just as bad an idea as it seems. Source: Dealt with it occasionally at a computer repair shop I worked at.
This is such a bad idea. For large systems/companies there are management platforms.
Re: Dell is reflashing the bios automatically on reboot now?
#9What a ridiculously bad idea. :-/
As an anecdote, MSI's dragon center utility bricked my motherboard trying to apply a BIOS/UEFI update which required me to use the flashback recovery method and wait in terror for about 15 minutes to see if I would have a working computer again.
After that experience, I will only use the usb thumb drive + booting into BIOS/UEFI method for applying updates.
Re: Dell is reflashing the bios automatically on reboot now?
#10If it's running Windows then sometimes BIOS updates can be delivered through Windows update. Yes it's just as bad an idea as it seems. Source: Dealt with it occasionally at a computer repair shop I worked at.
I am pretty sure I have seen it on Ubuntu also.
I've not seen it yet on Ubuntu, at least not through the default update path - occasionally I'll see a pop up for "firmware update available" though.
Windows will automatically deploy the BIOS update along with any other automatically deployed updates.
That being said, I rarely use vanilla Ubuntu and rarely use Dell, so maybe I've just not seen it and it does happen.