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Just a quick 'thanks' to all in this thread.
I have an old N36L (so old I didn't get the cash back!) with the original BIOS.
I used TheBAY's patched BIOS image, and jzaw's suggestion of flashrom, to update the BIOS. Although I could have done it right inside CentOS (which the box is running - and which can get flashrom easily via EPEL), instead I just made a bootable SystemRescueCD USB flash drive, which already includes flashrom, copied the image to it, booted, and ran flashrom fine.
On first reboot, I had to disable the IDE mode on ports 5 and 6, and also change the hard drive boot order to have disc 5 at the top of the list, in the BIOS, and then everything worked. My system drive happens to contain two (degraded) mdadm RAID 1 mirrors for /boot and /, so grub and fstab refer to the md devices instead of hdb. During boot, CentOS correctly restarted these arrays, now on /dev/sde instead of /dev/hdb as-was, and all carried on fine.
Edit: And the previously useless eSATA port (which would only work with drives plugged in at boot time) is now hot-pluggable.
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