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Unplug power, remove coin battery, connect the BIOS chip to a raspberry pico using a SOIC8 clamp, connect pico to your laptop, flash directly.
Me updating without a UPS: (But maybe a surge protector)
Your surge protector:
Your surge protector plug:
Another reason US plugs are shit
Add in a cat with the zoomies rushing by that outlet every 15 seconds.
And a toddler chasing the cat...
You do not sound like I do, obviously.
I just updated my BIOS on a 6yo motherboard because I upgraded the processor. Went up about 15 updates that had to be done one by one and took all day. I only broke it once because there are no guides or manuals on how to setup the USB drive from one version update to another. Had to figure out how to load a recovery image from another guide for another MB that they did create a guide for. Darn you Gygabyte for your poor documentation.
I've upgraded my CPU several months ago and, like a dumbass, hadn't checked whether I needed to update BIOS beforehand. Turns out, I did need it. Luckily, I've also found out my motherboard had the USB flash BIOS option, so I've downloaded the update from my laptop onto a USB stick and it updated normally first try. Gave me a scare at first, though, I thought I'd broken something while installing the new CPU.
Same thing happened to me. I had a Ryzen 1600 and a x470 from my wife's old computer that had been shelved for about a year, she needed to update to Win11 for work and it was better deal to buy a bundle at Microcenter than to just by a new processor, those were the days......, so I decided to use the existing parts I had to build a family PC. So I checked that a 5500 is compatible with my x470 but when I put it in I would get a RAM fail error. I thought the RAM and MB had gotten damaged at some point. I put the old processor back in and everything worked so maybe the CPU was bad out of the box. I was literally working on the return process when I decided to check Gygabyte's website to see if there were any notes for the motherboard. There it was, an update to add compatibility to the MB but I was on r6.0 and needed to get to r62.0 and figured out the hard way that I couldn't just install the latest version, there were specific versions that had to be installed first.
As much as it doesn't stop me using their products, Gigabyte documentation is truly horrendous - I got a motherboard that wasn't working and had to email the manufacturer asking what the beep code meant. Turned out it needed a firmware update to support the CPU which they were very helpful in sorting out, but I really feel like beep codes should be listed in the manual.
Even worse is updating the idrac/perc firmware in a server several hours away, knowing that you’ll get yelled at and have your whole day ruined if it goes badly. If it goes perfectly, nobody will know. Seems like no upside and unbounded downside…
I've never had a failed bios flash.
but i still sit in pants shitting terror every time i have to do one. it doesnt help that power isnt the most stable thing where i live.
Because that one time it bricked something or went wrong is raw.
How you have unstable power and no UPS?
This little thing called being a poor ass bitch.
I would recommend going to an office supply auction. They will basically give you dead UPSs for free and the 3rd party replacement batteries for them can be had for $50-$75. Well worth it to protect a high value asset such as your desktop PC. Definitely cheaper than a new motherboard.
god, I wish my finances were well off enough to be able to blow 50-75 bucks on something like that.
to be fair, I've only lost 2 PCs to catastrophic failure.
Neither were because of the power.
One was from a lightning strike. one was from a GPU catastrophically failing and taking the motherboard with it by turning both into charcoal (and no, that wasnt because the PSU, that PSU was perfectly fine and powered many computers after this one with no incident)
My finances are in similarly poor shape for the last 2 years now (why it's so is a long story), so I know exactly how you feel. For what it's worth, a surge protector is much cheaper, but only helps with overvoltage, not undervoltage AFAIK. Still could potentially save your PC, not from a failed bios flash, but from any weird surges. But if you have a high quality PSU, it can probably handle somewhat unstable power. I just googled mine and it says it has full-range active PFC, automatically handling the input voltage range of 100V to 240V - though the grid here is 230V per phase so I should probably get a surge protector myself. Those are like 20€ new apparently. If you're on a lower voltage grid like in the US and your PSU has a similar range, you probably don't need to worry about overvoltage.
Years ago I bricked a MB while updating the bios so yes it scares me.
this is why I love msi motherboards, they have a little separate microcontroller that can flash the bios from a USB drive in an emergency
Pretty sure that's most am5 boards. It's required by AMD to certify it or something IIRC
That's exactly what saved me once, indeed.
The standard should be an A/B partition system, lile a lot of phones do. Flash B while booted to A, or Flash A when booted to B. If a flash fails, you can still boot the previous firmware.
Put your hands down, I know about security. The point is after the flash is successfully booted on the new firmware, it can be copied to the other partition to eliminate a regressive boot to old firmware.
For a while Gigabyte boards used this as a selling feature and I thought it was genius! Never had to use it, thankfully, but it brought some piece of mind.
Ever since I bought a desktop motherboard with a secondary BIOS/UEFI ROM, I'll never buy one without it again. The peace of mind alone is worth any extra cost. And it has saved me from failed flashes twice.
Hadn't heard of this. Is it fairly easy to come by now? Can't afford to upgrade anytime soon, but hopefully in a year or two if the memory market ever stabilizes.
It is more common now. I've seen two implementations of it:
- The board has an A and B ROM, which are both treated with the same priority, and a button that switches which one the PC boots from. You can reflash the one that's selected. With this it's actually practical to have two different BIOS/UEFI builds and switch between them, but to be honest that's rarely useful unless you're testing/troubleshooting related stuff. It's usually labelled "Dual BIOS" or something like that.
- The board has a primary ROM and a backup. It only ever boots from the primary, but if POST fails you can push a button to reflash the primary from the secondary. The secondary backs up the primary when there's a good POST, usually automatically and not user configurable. It's usually labeled "backup BIOS" or something similar.
These are not standard, and not major selling points, so different manufacturers have different implementations and unfortunately different names for it. You have to do some reading, and it might not be mentioned in the product listing, you might have to find the manual to read the full specs. Your motherboard might even already have this feature without you knowing it. Does it have a button like this?
Or this (the BIOS_FLBK one, not the CLR_CMOS in the red box)
If you are buying a new board, the little two-digit display in that second picture is also a nice feature. It's a POST error code display. Rather than just getting some beeps during a POST failure, it will give you an error code that you can look up to figure out what the specific problem area is (e.g. RAM not fully inserted, clock mismatch, etc).
Usually only on top end mbs. Some cheaper ones have a bios recovery tho, which should achieve the same results
I've had three boards that advertised that/recovery bios that I needed the feature for, and none of them have worked. Also even if the features does work, it's a one-shot safety net; what are you going to do, abort your plan to update? If you did everything right the first time, you'll just end up with two bad flashes, so you're right back to nail-biting anxiety.
You'd think that a board would auto-revert from a failed flash, or - just spitballing here - make their fucking firmware for their fucking hardware not fucking fail spectacularly from basic testing and quality control. But I guess failed flashes drive sales so fuck fixing the problem, I guess.
Ugh. Actually angry about this, phones have had this issue solved for 15 years now but motherboards that have been around for like 50+ years, nah, too complex to fix. Sales go up ooga booga.
Wait, that is such a good point. Why aren't motherboard firmware updates atomic?
Hmm, my motherboard (Asus) just has a reset button that flashes the contents of the secondary ROM to the primary ROM. If there's any problem getting the primary to POST, you just push the button and it reflashes the primary from the secondary, so you're back in the original state. It's not a one-shot, because the contents of the secondary don't change. You can use it as many times as you need to.
Once you get a good POST from the primary, it updates the secondary. I've never had an issue with this system.
Phone mainboards are very different, which is a big part of why maintaining third-party phone OSes is such difficult work, and why GrapheneOS constrains itself to specific devices.
Suprised to see noone even mention CoreBoot :(
I've got plans to install Libreboot on a server motherboard I have. On that one, the BIOS chip is actually socketed, so I can get an upgraded chip with 16MiB instead of 2MiB, use an external device like a Raspberry Pi flash Libreboot on it, and then install it on the board.
No worries about bricking the board unless I break the socket or something, LOL!
Jeez, I just successfully flashed my BIOS for the first time and this meme/ thread has me feeling like I just jumped over a chasm filled with venomous snakes
These days it's totally fine. A lot of motherboards actually have several ways of dealing with this. One of the ways is the flashing is done in a separate part of the memory and the pointer is only updated if the write worked and is checksum verified. Another way of dealing with it is dual bios where there's actually two versions of the bios you can switch between (or is switched automatically). A third way is a recovery mode, where you can flash from a USB drive in a specific port even if the normal bios is totally corrupt.
Even back in the days it was mostly fine. You could just order a new bios chip from the manufacturer. Or if you had access to a programming device, you could take the bios chip out of its socket and program it outside the computer. Back in the old days many computer repair shops offered this as a service. If you had another computer / motherboard with a similar bios chip you could often hotswap the chip and flash it like that. A little bit risky, but works in a pinch, I've done it before.
But the process was annoying, where flashing would take a while and the flashing software maybe wasn't the best. So if it would crash or power got interrupted, you could be stuck with a non functioning computer. Lots of ways to fix it, but for a regular person it could mean not having a computer for at least a few days.
This just gave me the idea to back up my laptop's flash chip... just in case...
When that update is spinning, I'm not even going to touch it with a 10-foot pole.
I was trying to put a new SSD in my laptop recently, but it didn't recognize it. So I figured it needed a firmware update. I figured I could do this in BIOS, but nope! The updater was in .exe format.
Fortunately, I had an old Windows 8 install disc laying around. I had to install Windows 8 for all of 30 minutes to update my BIOS so it would take my new SSD. And it still didn't work! Well at least the BIOS is as up to date as it can be.
Your PC probably has a SATA M2 port but the drive is NVMe, same form factor, but not backwards compatible
Don't put dogs in dogs they don't bark well my teacher said. Well, my teacher is dead, but I still don't understand a damn thing that deep swamp swimming bish thought was kosher up outside the motor pit, least when there no gators in tradenum. Post doc do hit like a frolic, you know, y'know?
Carbon monoxide poisoning has claimed another victim from the sounds of it
I do not have turkey for you for I am as we all walked back in and other or what, regardless whether you weather the storm of your heart.
this post was submitted on 29 Sep 2026
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