On Monday 23 April 2007 14:45, Bob Scofield wrote: > On Monday 23 April 2007 11:32, Bill Kendrick wrote: > > Apparently (I finally got hold of the paperwork they sent back with > > the laptop after it was repaired), IBM decided to flash the BIOS > > with a new revision. That apparently mucked up the MAC addr. > > > > *Whew!* That was a close one! :^) > > 1) The thought the MAC address was set by the card itself. I guess > I was wrong.
Maybe the MAC is built into the motherboard. But flashing the firmware still shouldn't change the MAC. > 2) I thought BIOS flashing was dangerous enough that one should do > it only when necessary. > > 3) Why would IBM flash the BIOS on a hinge repair job? Just to be > nice? Maybe they're just being nice. Certainly they're in a position to replace any component they break by behaving dangerously. Maybe the new firmware helps to better enforce some kind of DRM. I seem to recall this happening with some kind of CD-ROM firmware update that gave CD-ROM drives worse error recovery, enabling various copy protection schemes to take advantage of the worse error recovery. But I don't recall hearing hardware vendors purposely installing the new firmware. Maybe they swapped hard drives and send back a new laptop with identical specs and the old HDD? This seems most likely, given that the MAC changed. Is the laptop missing any distinctive marks or decorations? --Ken -- Ken Bloom. PhD candidate. Linguistic Cognition Laboratory. Department of Computer Science. Illinois Institute of Technology. http://www.iit.edu/~kbloom1/
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