Semi-revisit of DP55WB Network Issues

I had spoken to a friend of mine about BIOS flashing at one point and he was very experienced at that.  Some time back, I had an article over the issues my DP55WB motherboard had and showed him the downloads.  He was kind enough to clear things up with me over what the downloads were.

The WB0336P.BIO file is used to restore in case the flashing goes wrong.  The WBIBX10J.86A.0336.BI.ZIP is a zip file that contains the flashing tool for DOS.  You would have to use something like unetbootin to build a FreeDOS boot disk.  Then, run the executable to flash the BIOS.  The last one WBIBX10J.86A.0336.EB.EXE is a Windows executable to update the BIOS directly.

As usual, it's important to get the motherboard right and make sure the power doesn't go out during flashing.  I'm not going to update my BIOS but this is good information to post here in the mean time.

Goodbye Gutsy... or not.

Sometimes, when you're tired, you do something really, really dumb.  So I decided to clean out the Linux partition on my old Acer laptop.  I had also discovered that the DVD drive can't read anything and the Acer recovery partition is throwing a fit on me by complaining about the dreaded missing GUI (*.WSI) files and it was giving me the error reason 0xa0000001.  Before it had dawned upon me too, I had made GRUB totally useless by purging the Linux partition (Way to go, idiot!).

To boot up my Windows Vista partition, I downloaded unetbootin and setup my 1 GB usb stick with Super Grub Disk.  Allow unetbootin to install the SGD because SGD2 doesn't work with it.

From SGD, the first thing I tried is to fix the Windows boot which would effectively kill GRUB on the mbr, but this did not work.  Using the Boot & Tools menu got me to select Boot Partition and start up my old Vista install.  At least I got to boot it!  Now to make my recovery partition work!

For resource, I'm going with this forum thread.  This reminded me that the way the partitions where setup when I got them was that I had an C: partition with the label ACER and a D: partition with the label DATA.  Since all the drive letters were mucked up badly, and Acer doesn't do a good job to make their recovery routines robust, I think I'll try to get my laptop partitions setup to resemble the way it did back when it was new.  Hopefully then I get finally get the factory reset stuff to work.