CentOS - May 2013 - semi-OT: flashing the BIOS on an HP dl580 GT, afterward

When last we saw our hero, er, sysadmin, he'd found that the
"noarch" BIOS
update was, in fact, a self-extracting .exe file, and he'd extracted it.
Finally getting the ok to take the system down, the following hilarity
(for small values of hilarity) ensued.

First, booting off unetbootin to freedos was fine... except it was try to
guess which version - freedos + emm386 + himem, no himem, live CD only,
or, finally, "no drivers loaded", which works. It gags on something
orders
of magnitude larger than it was written for, y'know.

Then I discover that the builtin type command does *not* have /p, and
there's no more command, and I should have read the longer files before I
started this. Fun with <ctrl-s> ensues.

Finally, I find what are actually DOS config.sys files, with different
extensions, and read them - they're one-liners, and find out how to run
the rompaq.exe that runs the utility to flash the drives, and run it. And
again. And again. And *finally* get the reason it's failing, and (to save
the original name) copied the actual data from an 8.3 name into 7 char,
which the utility demands: *exactly* seven chars, no more, no less.

And unlike the Dell utility, which give you lots of warm fuzzies
("collecting data", "this is for this hardware, this is newer, do
you want
to update?"), this just does it. Fortunately, this HBS contains a backup
ROM, just in case....

And a three-finger kill later, it's up. And I put the memory boards back
in, so we'll see if the BIOS update fixed the memory problems (remember
them? this song's about them)....

        mark