Flashing a BIOS?

[ChosterF]

i've been reading around a bit and have now come to wonder, why is flashing a BIOS bad/dangerous/risky?

I've done it (using gigabytes @BIOS) upgrading my m720 US3 to F7N (for an upgrade) and i didn't seem to encounter any problems at all, unless there is somekind of subtle malfunction?

 

[Brett928S2]

Hi

I own computer shops ...we make a customer who wants US to flash a bios for them to sign a form saying its at THEIR risk ..not ours...


The reason is..which will answer your question is...

If it goes wrong , which it WILL DO in around 20% of cases...your motherboard is HISTORY !

All the best Brett

 

[CDdude55]

It is a risky procedure in that it is possible to brink your board if something goes wrong, like if the power goes out in the middle of the flashing process or if you some how interfere with the flashing process in some way.

When people say it's risky they're talking about the process of BIOS flashing, not after it's already flashed.

 

[rds1220]

i've been reading around a bit and have now come to wonder, why is flashing a BIOS bad/dangerous/risky?

I've done it (using gigabytes @BIOS) upgrading my m720 US3 to F7N (for an upgrade) and i didn't seem to encounter any problems at all, unless there is somekind of subtle malfunction?

Beacause if you do something wrong or lose power while it is flashing the BIOS it will corrupt the BIOS. Once the BIOS is corrupt it's un-repearible and you have a really useless and really expensive paper weight.

Edit- Some motherboard companies are doing built it dual BIOS. If you corrupt the BIOS you can revert to the back up BIOS. For safety reasons the secondary /backup BIOS can not be altered or changed.

 

[ChosterF]

tanks for the help, it makes somuch more sense now

so, what is the safe alternative to updating a BIOS (without a floppy drive?)

 

[CDdude55]

tanks for the help, it makes somuch more sense now

so, what is the safe alternative to updating a BIOS (without a floppy drive?)

There really is no full safe way of flashing the BIOS, but really, it is already safe just as long as you don't mess with your system while it's flashing and you make sure your power isn't going to go out.

 

[geofelt]

tanks for the help, it makes somuch more sense now

so, what is the safe alternative to updating a BIOS (without a floppy drive?)

1) The safest alternative is to NOT flash your bios at all.
You should only do so if there is a fix that addresses a problem that is seriously bothering you.

2) Most current motherboards have a update process that uses a usb drive and motherboard flashing capabilities. That is probably safer than a windows based update that might fail with a windows failure.

3) Regardless, buy a small ups. It will keep your pc running long enough for a flash, and in normal circumstances allow you to power down gracefully if you get a power failure.

 

[popatim]

Best advice right there ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Me, I've flashed many a bios and have never had a failure. If a flash fails all is not totally lost but the cost to fix it sure would exceed the cost of a cheap board.

 

[Xfiles63]

Ok I have another bios related question,Ive read that if your computer is behaving unstably and quirky then the only way to fix it is upgrading and flashing the bios.Also some computers need a bios update flash for supporting a higher speed chip.Also so I have read that you can save your original bios so that if something goes wrong you have your bios backed up to reflash your your machine.So this leads me to a machine that I need to flash the bios,its a dell inspiron 531 with AMD Sempron.I have an Athlon 64x2 which is on the computeres cpu support list.I have never flashed a bios in all the years I have been working or building machines with the exception of some dells that have a bexe bios update.Those are realy simple,you just download the file containing the bios upgrade,click run and it does it all by itself.Someone in this topic mention they don't have a floppy which is how bios flashing was done before the thumb drives were invented.Myself I have done away with using the floppy disk to use only thumb drives for saving files or I burn images or files to cd disk.So can anyone help me with how to do this?
Thanks