Long story, I reverted it back to BIOS v0805. AFUDOS seems to be provided by the BIOS manufacturer AMI Megatrends. I got it from
here. Posting the steps if someone runs into the same issue.
You will need 2x USB 2.0 drives for this, download the BIOS from
here.
Step 0 : Disconnect all other hard drives and USB drives.
Step 1 : Get
FreeDOS and create a bootable USB.
sudo dd if=FD12LITE.img of=/dev/disk2 bs=1m
Step 2 : Copy AFUDOS.exe, 0805.CAP, into the second USB (This is *not* the freedos one)
Plug in both USBs, power cycle/up the target host.
Boot up from the FreeDOS USB, and select "No, Return to DOS", You will end up with a DOS shell prompt (C:>) .
Step 3: cd into 2nd usb (Assuming its
D:\
) by typing
D:\
Step 4 : From the command prompt run
AFUDOS.exe 0805.cap /k /p /b /n /x
This will clear your BIOS and flash it with the version you provided.
My flashing erred out with "43 error clearing flash memory" or so, I just rebooted and finally did a 2nd flash with the EZ utility with the same CAP file, and it went well. (I guess). For me the 2411 version took out some settings in the
bios like Dedicated GFX card selection. Machine seems to be working stable as of now with 0 issues.
Do you see any advantage of moving to v2012 ? I would be very skeptic of doing anything on the bios now unless there's a valid reason.