T61 BIOS update - how serious is the "brick" risk?

Question

Reading through various posts here, it seems that it is either very easy to update the BIOS, or very easy to "brick" your system
Are there any known good methods?  Are there any tools that can back up the BIOS and if ncessary restore the BIOS using that backup?
Are there any "known bad" methods that are almost certain to brick the system?

Answer 1

You can do a bios update from your harddrive, you just cannot do it when booted into your 64bit windows version. 
There are other options. You can start the compuuter with a Windows PE (pre-installation envoromennt) Live CD, then run the 32bit program from your harddrive. When you run it from an optical drive you introduce the risk of disc read error, as well as the fact that optical discs are much slower then a HDD.
I'm preparing to flash a 64bit version at the moment and I'll describe how I'm doing it. Part of this process is to install a backup operating system onto the computer,setup as dual boot. This way if I have any problems like data loss, I can start the computer from a different partition and run disc recovery programs on the main system drive (you sould never try to recover data on the same drive you booted from, so this is something I do with every computer I setup).
1. Search and download a freeware program ccalled "Parted Magic". It's a partition manager based on a Linux LiveCD and runs without installing anything on your harddrive (runs fully in ram memory). I'm going to skip over the "how to use parted magic because quite frankly, it's so simple that anyone unable to figure it out shouldn't be flashing bios or installing operating systems.
2. Resize your primary partition to give enough room to install a second operating system. I'm using a custom build of WinXP that only requires about 300mb, but I like to make the second partition large and use it for storage, that way any data loss on partition 2 can be repaired from your main operating system, and if I ever have to reformat my system drive, I can move any data I need to save to my second partition.
I generally give Win Seven or Vista a min of 20GB, but you can use a smaller partition if you're not going to install a lot of programs. This laptop has an 80GB harddrive and I'm making two 40GB primary partitions.
*note, if you want to mix WinXP and Windows Vista/Seven, you'll need to either install XP first, or repair the Vista/Seven boot manager that XP will overwrite. It's an easy fix but to keep this simple I'll avoid any unnecessary instructionns.
After you finish making your second partition formated with NTFS, simply boot your Windows install disc and select the second partition and install.
You'll now have a second windows version. 
Assuming you selected a 32bit version, you can use it to run anything that won't run under win x64.
If you prefer to boot from a WinPE disc, you can download the software you need to make it direct from microsoft. Here is a wikipedia article that will tell you more about this.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Preinstallation_Environment
You can also do a google search and you'll find many guides on making them. I would recommend you boot a winPE disc and do some exploring of your computer so you get the feel of it, and more important, so you can be sure it's running stabe on your system. You might even be able to run some of those old dos games that windows objects to running, so have some fun and get the feel of it. 
If you can run even small basic programs from winpe, then you can be pretty sure it's stable enough to flash a bios. The problem with the bios boot disc is you have no oportunity to do anything,  it boots and flashes...  it won't decide "wait a minute, why is my screen flicering and power LEDs flashing, maybe I better figure this out first", it just proceeds forth like a good soilder, obeying orders even if they are fatal.
I hope this information is helpful, I believe it all to be accurate, but please remember that I'm not recommending you flash your bios, you have to make that decision.
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