How Risky is Updating Your BIOS? ( + Corruption Demonstration)

Me updating the bios on every computer in my house during a Florida Hurricane: Interesting

I have a story. A friend came in to give a laptop that shut down randomly and displayed overheating. So, I opened it up and cleaned it. Didn't check if it would randomly shut down, I just checked if it would boot and then I returned it. Then a few minutes later he calls me and says it randomly shutting down again. So I said, wait, Ill come over to your place and check it out. When I arrived, the laptop's BIOS WAS BEING UPDATED!. Apparently he turned it back on several times and the old problem of shutting down randomly still continued, and one time when it shut off, it recommended a bios update, and my friend clicked YES. Dude almost bricked his laptop. Had me screaming on him for a while for doing that on a lappy that randomly crashes. In any case, the silicon was faulty, and I installed a new processor and it worked out fine. 👍

UEFI does a lot more than just tell your computer where to find the bootloader. It also acts as an abstraction layer between the OS and the physical hardware. It usually handles stuff like wake-on-lan, virtualization extensions, hardware RAID and full-disk encryption, too. It's why it's generally a good idea to keep on top of EFI releases for your PC/motherboard. That said, never go bleeding-edge with them. Wait a month or two after any new firmware release to see if the forums light up with posts about problems being introduced by that new release. I learned this the hard way once.

A Note: Some have mentioned that it's possible the reason the recovery tool failed was because it didn't support large flash drives like the 32GB one I was using, and this is an issue that has come up in the past. Unfortunately I had already trashed the laptop so I'm unable to test that, but if you are having that issue, it might be worth trying a flash drive that is USB 2.0 and 4GB or less, and ensuring it's formatted as FAT32.

"I bought a laptop as a sacrifice" TECH FOR THE TECH GOD. TECH FOR THE TECH GOD

who remembers the old days of thiojoe where he would make videos like "How to triple wifi speed for free" where he would tell you to wrap your router in aluminium foil

Had no idea updating BIOS was risky. I updated mines last week because i was upgrading from a R5 2600 to an R7 5800x. It was actually super easy to do.

Interesting side note: During a BIOS update the downloaded file is usually verified to prevent flashing of broken or manipulated images. BIOS flashback in some cases skips this step entirely. This allows for flashing of custom images, ie adding NVME boot support to older mainboards and other hacky stuff.

Me: Updating the BIOS PC: remains unbootable Me: Let’s see what we can do This video’s thumbnail:

This happened to a friend of mine, but I was there watching it happen. Back during Y2K, there was a rash of BIOS updating going on. I personally thought that it was mostly unnecessary to do, as Y2K was not really about modern computers like PC's, it was more about ancient computers from the 70's or earlier which were still running in businesses at the time. Anyways, we were part of an IT team, and were applying Y2K patches for servers, so we had to come in after midnight and work through into the early morning, while no one else was using the computers. My friend's boss asked him to update the BIOS of the Dell desktop that he was using for his personal work PC, while we were in there for the servers. I told my buddy not to do that, as there was more danger upgrading the BIOS than there was in not upgrading it. But he didn't listen, and sure enough the BIOS upgrade screwed everything up. The BIOS didn't fail its installation, it installed correctly, but for some reason Dell had changed the hard drive mapping routine between the two versions of the BIOS, and the new BIOS could no longer read the hard drive partition, even though nothing had changed on the hard drive. Then later we found out that Dell didn't even make the previous version of the BIOS available for downgrade! The only solution was to reformat the hard drive to the new partition scheme, and reinstall Windows. All previous data on the drive was lost, obviously! Thanks Dell.

Well, I had the worst case scenario. My cousin was updating the bios with a slightly different variant version. Bios did not recognise it before installation so it bricked. Long story short, i had to use an spi flasher, find a compatible program, desolder the chip, find the correct model and manually flash the .bin into it. The satisfaction was huge after all!

One of the worst bios experiences I had was my first HP Pavilion. Wiped it to give to my brother and the bloatware decided to do a bios update (and general driver installs). While the bios is being written a Windows update restart Countdown appears in the bottom right... And it refused to let me click cancel. HP were amazing as the device was 3 years old and they still serviced it to recover the bios. Learned JTAGs because of this. 😂 EDIT: this was 2010.

My computer has dual UEFI chips. There’s a backup chip that can take over to reflash the main one if something goes wrong.

What a coincidence, I was at work yesterday and a computer didn't recognize a headphone connected in the front jack 3.5, so I updated the BIOS and it worked after that.

Sir, this is what I call a professional and well documented informative tutorial. Well done 👍

As an Eletrical Engineer I would say as a rule of thumb: update your BIOS only if you want a specifc function of the update if you don't know what you are doing. If you know what are you doing, you can update it and it will hardly go wrong unless you get power issues or the wrong version of the BIOS. And if that happens it is easy enough to re-record it but you will need a special hardware-device to do this

As an electronics repair technician I've seen this happen more often than you'd think. For most motherboards we simply flash the chip with it's respective firmware using a similar tool you showed. Except its SPI to USB A. In rare cases we get a non standard cmos chip, then we use leads we souldered to a USB A male with tiny alligator clips on the other end. The software isn't that difficult. We have a dumbed down GUI based CMOS flashing tool that handles the complex stuff on the backend. Essentially it's like copying a file to a USB drive.

"I bought a laptop as a sacrifice." *hawaiian drums intensify*

If you are updating your bios from a USB port in BIOS mode, do not use a USB3 port as there is no support for that in the BIOS. More recent MBs do provide basic support for it but it is better to use an old USB2 port to update the bios.

Flashed dozens on BIOSes. Never had any problem. Its next to impossible to mess up if you do everything properly so reading readme files is a must.