Dell Precision 470 Bios Update A05 to A07

Published by Torry Crass on

Well this was proving to be quite the nightmare so I thought I'd post a quick note both for anyone looking and for myself to remember how to go about this.

The problem:

When attempting to flash the Dell Precision 470 bios from A05 to A07 I ran into problems.  Dell does not provide a bootable bios disk for this process which means you need to perform this bios update from an existing OS.  I chose Knoppix since they do provide a .bin file and I had a Knoppix disc readily available.  Upon running the file I received the following:

tail: cannot open `+78' for reading: No such file or directory

gzip: stdin: not in gzip format

The solution:

This is clearly a problem.  If the bios update won't run, well, then we obviously can't update the bios.  The solution to this is two fold.

  • a) Make sure you are logged in as root, if you're not, do 'su – root' and that should do it.
  • b) Type the following 'export _POSIX2_VERSION=199209'

Now, run the bios update again and it should work.  If it doesn't, I recommend you poke around more forums and see what you can find.  This solution worked for me and I really couldn't tell you what to do on this one past this work around.  Cheers!


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