[dom111]

Years ago, on an old (~2000/2001, AMD K series maybe?) system, I was doing some patches for a friend of mine and noticed there was an update for his BIOS. Went through the normal process of backing up to a floppy (luckily, I didn't always do this on my own upgrades before this point!), began the flash process and it all appeared to work fine. Rebooted and the machine didn't come up at all. Blank screen, nothing. I totally panicked. He came to check in and I must've been profusely sweating by this point and we chatted it through, but I noticed, on reboot, the floppy drive gave a tiny click, not like the normal exaggerated one it would do when normally booting. I had a glimmer of hope that it might still read a boot record from the disk, which it did. When the floppy stopped grinding, I carefully typed in the commands (even though there was no output to screen), I knew were on the disk (after running back home to build a bootable disk with a flasher and the BIOS dump) managed to restore the BIOS back to running perfectly with the old version!

Was absolutely terrifying, but very rewarding to get back a machine that we were both sure was bricked!