abit AN-M2 write protected BIOS

This is something of an affirmation of why I am moving everything over to Macs.

I have an abit AN-M2 in my main non-Mac desktop PC. I needed to upgrade the BIOS to fix certain bugs which prevented me using the machine properly.

It took three days to sort out getting to the point where I have a DOS prompt and the BIOS files to flash it.
I made several pathetic attempts to use floppy disks, being thwarted by a) machines with no floppy drives, b) machines with dead floppy drives and c) stacks of dead floppy disks.
Then I tried USB drives. How do make a USB drive bootable without MS-DOS or Windows? Another dead end.
Finally I wrote the files to a CD and booted to DOS from a Win98 installer CD.

Anyway. I ran awdflash, saved a backup of the BIOS to a floppy, then started to flash the BIOS.

BEEP
"BIOS is Write Protected". Can't continue, press F10 to exit.

Okay, so I need to reboot, go into the BIOS and switch off the protection.

Only I can't. The machine is dead. It's as if the BIOS has been overwritten. But lo, it is write protected.

No, it really has killed the BIOS. That's it. The motherboard is dead. I am without a PC. I need to order, from somewhere across the sea, a replacement BIOS chip at a cost of approximately 25% of a replacement motherboard.

I've encountered some shocking bugs over the years and this is certainly up there among the best.

I will get this machine running again, it is mostly new components and I've only recently invested in an extra 4GB of RAM for it (the root reason for the BIOS upgrade). But whether I retain it or sell it is another matter. Perhaps I will manage fine with just my iMac. Perhaps I'll get a Mac Mini.

UPDATE 1st Jan 2010:

I have a solution for this issue, and yes it is a bug with the motherboard.

You can successfully flash the BIOS by calling "AWBFLASH /F" to force flashing - it simple ignores the phantom write protect. Of course, this is only useful if you can boot your machine or haven't rebooted after getting the original error.

What I did:
1. I got a new BIOS.
2. I booted the machine with the new BIOS to MS-DOS.
3. I hotswapped the BIOS chip back to the old broken one. Yes this is possible, no I don't recommend it. You break it, and it's YOUR fault.
4. I flashed the old BIOS with the latest ROM image.
5. It works. I now have two BIOS chips.

I actually now have two AN-M2 BIOSes - one at v18 and one at v19. The 18 one has a bug which misreports the available memory to the OS. The 19 one has a bug which breaks the onboard Ethernet. <sigh>
As I said previously, I'm switching gradually to Mac hardware. Everything just works.
Perhaps the Linux servers should be from Sun.