Which motherboard bios to flash

gbswales

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Dec 31, 2011
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I have a PC with a gigabyte GA-MA770-UD3 mother board
I experience problems with random changes to drive ordering in windows and someone has suggested this might mean that I need to flash the BIOS to a newer version

This is not an area I am familiar with and the gigabyte update site is full of dire warnings about this

I have a few questions

1) As I dont have a floppy drive and my m/b wont boot from USB I want to download their @BIOS live update utilitie which allows it to be done in Windows and pick up the new file online. However there are two versions of the install file one which is presumably the normal one and another for X79 chipset motherboards. I used Belarc to identify the motherboard but this doesnt define which chipset it is - how can I find out if mine is X79 or not?

2) For my Motherboard the gigabyte download first asks if it is for REV1.0, REV2.0 or REV2.1 there is a BIOS link for each of them so how would I find out which I currently have through windows, as Belarc doesnt display the REV number

3) Is it possible that what might really be needed are updated drivers - I can see there is one which is listed as SATA RAID where the details are the same for all versions - however even here there are two choices one for
AMD SATA RAID and another for AMD SATA AHCI

The drive numbers changing occasionally on re-boot doesnt cause any general problems in Windows BUT does sometimes stop my incremental system back up from working in Paragon Back up - this updates by disc number so when I create my first back up on the C drive while is is showing as Drive 0 the subsequent incrementals expect the disc to always be drive 0 so when it occasionally becomes Drive 2 on a reboot the back up fails due to it not being able to find the boot partition it expects on drive 0

I have four SATA hard drives - the one I use as C:\ is a 120GB SSD, then there is is a 250GB which holds my system back ups from Paragon. Then there are two internal 2GB samsung drives which hold my data and my media files plus a permanently attached external 3GB drive which holds content back up from the other two.

If anyone has other ideas about how to fix the core problem of disk numbers changing then I would be grateful as I am not particularly keen on flashing the BIOS with its associated risks
 

gbswales

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Dec 31, 2011
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Thanks - I know I can get to it this way but was hoping to avoid it as it is physically quite difficult with my set up. That said I have now installed gigabytes flashing through windows tool and when I run it, after it connects to gigabyte ftp servers, it only gives me one option - still nervous of doing it as I am currently working from home and totally dependent on the computer
 
cpu-z will read your mb info and tell you what rev it is. for flashing the bios you dont need to boot from the usb..there a dos bios program built into the bios. you just hit an f key at post and have the bios flash file unzipped on the root of the usb stick.