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Trying every combination to flash my Asus motherboard's BIOS

jeffgeerling.com

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Re: Trying every combination to flash my Asus motherboard's BIOS

#61

Post by londons_explore »

mastax wrote: post #58
zbrozek wrote: post #21

I once bricked a motherboard with a bad flash, probably around 2012. I ended up desoldering the SPI flash and reprogramming it from another computer. Worked. In hindsight, it was quicker to do that than to go through the "front door" with the manufacturer-provided utilities.

Some motherboard makers (Gigabyte, I think?) would include a socket for the BIOS EEPROM chip, even in relatively mid-range motherboards. I thought that was really cool, but a bit strange. It makes sense on high-end overclocking motherboards where some customers might actually use it and where there's not much of a cost constraint. But it seemed a bit extravagant to spend ~$0.30 on something that almost nobody would e…

I believe all modern boards allow flashing in-circuit using test pins.

That's what they'll do if you RMA the board...

Re: Trying every combination to flash my Asus motherboard's BIOS

#62

Post by jeroenhd »

dev_hugepages wrote: post #8
mkopec wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can actually use `fwupdtool install-blob` to update the UEFI if the board supports and uses UEFI capsule update. I did that with my Asus B550-I and it just worked, it reboots to ASUS EZ-Flash and does the update automatically. All Asus would need to do is publish updates on LVFS.

How do you know if the board supports it? Asking because I want to update my firmware for my lenovo legion

I've updated my Thinkpad through the GNOME Software Store at some point, it was listed as a "system update" that automatically used fwupdmgr to install the latest UEFI image.

I don't know if the Legion line has the same level of support, but you may just be able to ru "fwupdmgr update" and get prompted to reboot for an UEFI/Intel ME/SSD firmware update.

Re: Trying every combination to flash my Asus motherboard's BIOS

#63

Post by jeroenhd »

AshamedCaptain wrote: post #46
TillE wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some BIOSes (Gigabyte, I think) will also read NTFS, so if you've got a Windows install, that's another easy option.

The majority of BIOSes support NTFS. Incredibly enough more BIOSes support NTFS than they do exFAT. (Yet another example of the unfairness of the playing field for non-MS OSes).

Does anyone actually use exFAT? I know it's a simple cross platform file system and all, but every phone, tablet, laptop and desktop OS supports NTFS these days. Especially for read only stuff.

Re: Trying every combination to flash my Asus motherboard's BIOS

#64

Post by mjg59 »

xattt wrote: post #19
Aardwolf wrote: post #10

Guess I was lucky then, I flashed a very similar new asus motherboard from this same generation for AMD ryzen 7000 cpu's, I used the first random usb stick lying around, wrote the bios update to it from linux, possibly had to rename the file to something specific (manually. Who needs a tool for that? Also why doesn't asus just give it the correct name in the zip file?), and flashing worked first try. May have been a…

Is using flashrom(1) in-situ not an option? (1) https://www.flashrom.org/Flashrom

Firmware will typically configure the SPI controller such that flash can't be written directly from the OS, both as a self-protection mechanism (there's been malware in the past that deliberately bricked boards by overwriting the firmware) and as a security boundary (if you can modify flash directly, you can replace the set of keys trusted by secure boot).

Re: Trying every combination to flash my Asus motherboard's BIOS

#65

Post by zamadatix »

jeroenhd wrote: post #63
AshamedCaptain wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The majority of BIOSes support NTFS. Incredibly enough more BIOSes support NTFS than they do exFAT. (Yet another example of the unfairness of the playing field for non-MS OSes).

Does anyone actually use exFAT? I know it's a simple cross platform file system and all, but every phone, tablet, laptop and desktop OS supports NTFS these days. Especially for read only stuff.

Does Android support NTFS by default these days?

Re: Trying every combination to flash my Asus motherboard's BIOS

#66

Post by nonbirithm »

_rs wrote: post #20
scruple wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently updated an MSI Z690-A to the latest BIOS in preparation for installing a 13th generation Intel. I downloaded the updated BIOS file, put it on a thumb drive, renamed it to "MSI.ROM," put the thumb drive into the "Flash BIOS" port, had the motherboard connected to ATX and CPU1 power only, no CPU, or RAM, or any other hardware installed, flipped on power, pressed the "Flash BIOS" button and everything worked…

Yeah I’ll give a +1 to MSI, their BIOS firmware updates have been nothing but smooth for me and I haven’t had to think much about which USB sticks I’ve used. I’m about 80% sure I’ve used a USB 3 stick at one point but can’t be certain

MSI? The same thing the author describes happened to me with a new MSI Mortar a while ago. It turns out the BIOS didn't recognize the new Ryzen CPU I bought because it was too new and an update was required. I'd never experienced that before so it took me several hours to realize that and find the "support newer CPU revisions" update buried in one of MSI's support pages. Then I found the flashing process wasn't working and there were no errors to indicate it was really the USB stick I was using that was incompatible. I went through 5 USB sticks before I could flash the thing successfully and have confidence that my brand-new motherboard wasn't a paperweight straight out of the box. Can't imagine what I would have done if I ran out of USB sticks earlier.

Re: Trying every combination to flash my Asus motherboard's BIOS

#67

Post by AshamedCaptain »

jeroenhd wrote: post #63
AshamedCaptain wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The majority of BIOSes support NTFS. Incredibly enough more BIOSes support NTFS than they do exFAT. (Yet another example of the unfairness of the playing field for non-MS OSes).

Does anyone actually use exFAT? I know it's a simple cross platform file system and all, but every phone, tablet, laptop and desktop OS supports NTFS these days. Especially for read only stuff.

It's the filesystem all SD cards sold today come pre-formatted with. And, by extension, almost all USB pendrives.

Re: Trying every combination to flash my Asus motherboard's BIOS

#68

Post by brokenmachine »

mastax wrote: post #58
zbrozek wrote: post #21

I once bricked a motherboard with a bad flash, probably around 2012. I ended up desoldering the SPI flash and reprogramming it from another computer. Worked. In hindsight, it was quicker to do that than to go through the "front door" with the manufacturer-provided utilities.

Some motherboard makers (Gigabyte, I think?) would include a socket for the BIOS EEPROM chip, even in relatively mid-range motherboards. I thought that was really cool, but a bit strange. It makes sense on high-end overclocking motherboards where some customers might actually use it and where there's not much of a cost constraint. But it seemed a bit extravagant to spend ~$0.30 on something that almost nobody would e…

Gigabyte dualBIOS https://www.gigabyte.com/WebPage/3/tech_080516_des-a-feature...

I don't think it has a socket, it just has two flash chips soldered to the board.

eg Gigabyte Z690 AORUS TACHYON https://www.gigabyte.com/Motherboard/Z690-AORUS-TACHYON-rev-...

Re: Trying every combination to flash my Asus motherboard's BIOS

#69

Post by brokenmachine »

mardifoufs wrote: post #23
iforgotpassword wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, we're unfortunately back to an unhinged race for the performance crown at any cost.

Higher idle power consumption is more common on AMD CPUs (I think it's inherent to their design). I don't think intel CPUs consume nearly as much power when idle. Oddly enough, AMD GPUs also have the same problem under certain conditions (multiple monitors, or high refresh rates can result in 100w idle GPU power ) But I agree that the power consumption figures under load are a bit nuts, and intel/amd now seem to be e…

They're very close actually, at least at stock frequency.

https://www.guru3d.com/articles_pages/amd_ryzen_9_7900_proce...

Both Intel 12900k and AMD 7900 are 78W idle.

So it's basically neck-and-neck on idle power because those CPUs are around the same performance.

Where the power usage is crazy different is multicore load, 320W for the Intel vs 158W for AMD.

edit: actually an AMD 7900X is 299W on MC load. A 7900X is 15% faster on MC than a 7900. So Intel and AMD seem quite similar on power usage.

Re: Trying every combination to flash my Asus motherboard's BIOS

#70

Post by Panzer04 »

iforgotpassword wrote: post #16
Scoundreller wrote: post #13

Interesting non-BIOS observations: > So I popped everything together, made sure it benchmarked as expected, tested an Intel Arc A750 in preparation for testing on a Raspberry Pi, and then decided the 7900x's egregious power consumption wasn't to my liking the thing idled over 90W, and would eat up over 285W while compiling Linux! > I wanted to enable AMD's 'Eco' mode, which limits the TDP from the stock 170W to eithe…

Yes, we're unfortunately back to an unhinged race for the performance crown at any cost.

I’m not sure why I’d care. An extra 100w amounts to a couple cents an hour for most people. Not relevant most of the time, and will shave time off almost any CPU task (as this is increasing the single-threaded speed, which applies to almost everything - sans memory or storage bottlenecks).

Sounds like a worthwhile trade off for most people to me, and more so if you do anything remotely CPU-intensive.

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