LFC#183 - Gigabyte's BIOS update bricked my B450 Aorus M

hello interwebs welcome to let's fix computers just to add a quick bit of context of the video you're about to watch I've been reviewing the gigabyte be 350 horas M motherboard and when I tried to do a BIOS update on it so I could drop a rise in 3600 in it it went horribly horribly wrong so roller film [Music] so before I actually fly this thing up with a risin 3,000 in it I've got a BIOS update set now I was going to do all of this bit off-camera because I've already got a video in the works on how to do BIOS updates so I can just start pointing people to a card in the top right corner of the screen instead of having to do it on every single video however the BIOS updates for this board had a lot of scary-looking red text against them so I thought will actually record this just cuz it looks like there might be a bit more to it on this bit let's take a look at what's on the gigabyte website so as you can see on the top BIOS updates we've got here before updating your BIOS to this new version you must follow the steps as BIOS f4 T's notes description in advanced okay let's roll down to f40 know if you're using q-flash utility to update the BIOS but make sure you have updated the BIOS to f32 before 40 right okay so we might have to pre update this to F 32 first and number two before update BIOS to f40 you have to install EC of firmware update tool or later version to avoid Ford in DDR compatibility on third gen Rison will add I've never had to go through these kind of hoops to do a BIOS update before but then on the other hand I think this is my first time BIOS updating a be 450 motherboard for a rise in 3 the previous a couple of times I've done this has been on x4 70 so whatever let's follow the instructions the first thing I'm going to do is put in my flashing chip which is an a8 9600 yeah I ate 9600 I'm gonna put this in there and check what version we've already got now because that firmware update tool is a Windows tool I might actually have to do I get a Windows installation onto an SSD or something so I can get this thing into Windows to update it which is Wow see that's not a big deal for me but if you're doing this as a home update then that's a bit of a hassle I'm not sure if other boards are actually going to require you to do this and I'm actually going to look into it in a minute so stay tuned we're going to get this thing up and running and then we'll see whether this is actually quite a rip Merle that only this board has to go through let's get it turned on and see what's in the vials okay the board power cycled once before it posted but that's completely normal for a new motherboard so not surprising at all I said this in many videos but I'll always remind people don't panic if you're brand new motherboard takes a long time to post completely normal right bass has been reset okay let's see what we've got so BIOS version BIOS version what do we got CPU easy mode BIOS okay let's drop into easy mode that often gives you a lot of information at face value here we go right BIOS version f2 Wow okay so we've got a super early BIOS on this thing so it's picking up all everything we've got in here correctly we've got our eight ninety six hundred and sixteen gigs of ram that's absolutely fine so yeah fine we've got to do everything with this then and the other thing as well is I noticed if we go back into classic mode our BIOS update utility is q-flash so we've got to do all this red text stuff as well okay I've preemptively downloaded BIOS version f/32 and the second to latest version I've downloaded F 32 which is the first one we've got to jump up to and F 41 which is the latest version that retains the PCI Express Gen 4 bodge because I want to do testing on that later on down the line so I'm going to retain that compatibility so first we're going to take this thing up to F 32 then I'm going to get a Windows installation on there so we can take a look at this firmware update utility and find out if you actually need to run that or not oh we are stuck in a no post it's bouncing between CPU and DRAM and not going any further at the moment and it's had a couple of minutes now I've just kind of left it just to see if it'll come good on its own and we don't seem to be getting anywhere this was just the f32 update up and that had no warnings attached to it so I haven't tried to do anything out of the ordinary yet so yeah this looks like this could be a hassle so apparently it's getting stuck on DRAM so the first thing that I'm going to do is I'm going to just turn it off and turn it on again so power off the CPU let's just let it settle and then I'm just gonna turn it back on and just give it another spin and just see if it comes good [Music] so we're gonna be looking at these lights here we need that to move all the way around but once again it just bounced from CPU to D round again that doesn't look good just a quick side note here there's gonna be a loss of stopping and starting as I try to boot this computer over and over and over and over again so I'm gonna cut out like the 10 seconds of no post each time because otherwise we're gonna be here all day but trust me every time I try and boot this thing I'm giving it a good 10 or 15 seconds to show me anything at all any signs of life but I am gonna chop those off just so there's less dead space in this video No okay I'm gonna move let's take one round module out and let's run it with a single round module Oh doing for temperature oh we've got no heat in that at all that's that's fine okay we've not back down to a single module let's give it another try same thing all right let's move my memory module to let's go to slot - this is 3400 RAM is pretty high but of course we don't have XMP or anything like that turned on so we're just running it a peasant speeds right now shouldn't be an issue what was that full stop now it doesn't want to do anything all right it doesn't like that that's all okay let's go to next slot along I'm gonna try these slots one by one until I get some kind of resolve but it's not happy I've never had this kind of issue doing a BIOS update before not unless there's been no man issues anyway same okay let's switch out to another module let's put the other module into the same slot then we'll move it back to the top slot again this is turbo dead it won't do anything ha [Music] time for BIOS reset battery out powers off at the socket let's walk away for 10 minutes 10 minutes lead hear how I bricked this motherboard BIOS battery back in power wrong actually I'm going to power off again I'm gonna switch back to the other round module the last known the last one that I saw it posting let's try again alright so it's turning on now that's an improvement over where we were it looks like we're still power cycling though so I think what I got to do is find out how you actually trigger off the backup BIOS on one of these boards because the the backup BIOS on the low-end gigabyte boards unfortunately don't give you just a simple switch the higher end boards have got a nice little dip switch so you can flip with between which bar using but you don't get that on the lower end ones it's supposed to be automatic or something so I've got to do a quick bit of research to find out how you actually say fall back I think he's supposed to be automatic but this thing ain't boot this thing ain't posting so let's look it up okay method one press and hold the start button until it turns off again here we go okay and don't that doesn't it like it's made any difference well it's getting stuck on DRAM so let's find some different route right here is some probably twenty four hundred megahertz ram this is out of my PC at home current what speed it is it's not very high I was feeling poor at the time and I'm putting it in the wrong way around I've just walked through the door this morning right okay let's see if we can get the day on track power on give me a post still doing the same thing it's not a memory compatibility issue well so much for having useful diagnostic LEDs and dual BIOS because I'm not getting any help from either right now normally these things that help your output yeah I don't know what's happened here I'm gonna leave that to run for a bit just in case it comes good with the different memory in it I'm gonna make a coffee well I was really hoping that memory was gonna work so scuppered my morning okay so a status report our motherboard is bricked it's not the memory there's no way this memory is incompatible and it is in the correct slot it's in slot 1 we have flashed a bio we have flashed to a mid age bios which is which had no warnings attached to it there was no red text on it let's check that website again just make sure I'm not being a complete dunce we went up to f/32 and not there are no warnings on f/32 let's roll back a little bit just make sure there's no red text a date chipset driver version no that's not gonna be a problem and there's nothing there they jump from five to thirty but yeah there's nothing there that makes me believe that I made a mistake so I don't that so yeah this ain't my fault and the problem is is that we haven't flashed high enough to support the Reisen 3000 either so the 3600 that I have to go into this board that's not going to work either but what I think I'm gonna do I'm gonna put the 3600 in there not because I think it's gonna work but it might force the motherboard to detect a change and do something because motherboards do with things when you start messing them about which I've said it many videos before they get upset they take a long time to post that kind of thing so I'm actually going to try and induce a upset into the system and that might get it to detect the apu again or you never know it might cause it to roll back its bios of course i'm assuming that it hasn't updated the backup the backup virus yet i mean there's no reason for it to if that would be really done this should be the celebratory moment where I put in my 3600 quite excited to build this computer not because it's a top-end rig or anything but it's just gonna be nice to have this is gonna be an this is gonna be part of my new reviewing build so I've actually got a dedicated computer to put parts in I'm reviewing so kind of excited for it really and this is a bit of an inauspicious start to its lifespan where's this where's the cooler on there it is I put cooler on top of that for good measure okay power on okay so that roll past CPU on 2d ran again that I wasn't expecting I don't believe it it's posting where it rolled around to VGA then oh we've got no VGA and this this CPU doesn't have a doesn't have graphics I think we might actually have a boot here but that doesn't make any sense because the BIOS that I flashed is not supposed to have Rison 3000 support all right let's get this handy graphics card in that I've got to hand I'll just wait for the lights to go out there we go sitting on that BGA light again oh there we go it's posted okay alright let's get this thing into BIOS and let's see what that hell is flash to it right now maybe it rolled back who knows right okay control delete we're gonna spam delete this doesn't make any sense there's no reason for it to be boosting right now I mean I'm not complaining because we're out of our we're out of our soft break right bias has been reset what version is it boss version f40 yeah we jumped straight up to f40 no we didn't because I'll tell you what else happened last night after I bricks this board I went home and I took the footage that with me and I watched that footage back I was like did i flash the ROM BIOS did I do something wrong and I watched that footage and I washed myself select f/32 whoo something strange is going on here and what's more I didn't download f4 oh no I did download at 40 no I didn't I downloaded F 32 and f41 I think there's a broken link on the gigabyte website oh well I'm you know what I'm not going to complain not going to complain fine alright so we now have booting board I'm gonna drop in my Patriot RAM and then I'm gonna do a test installation of Windows and I'm gonna get this thing into Windows as that crashed because the yeah it's crashed oh I don't like that at all okay let's turn that off a sec yeah the chip is cold it's not overheating with my purged CPU I've never had a CPU overheat while I'm doing this so yeah this is okay right okay theories so we have seen on when I the last time I was flashing a board when I flashed it up to the latest bios version the newest bios didn't support my apu but ironically despite the fact that the red texan on the website specifically said that this apu would not be supported after flashing it did still work which is why i have not considered that possibility but it might be that on this board they have dropped support for that apu and it doesn't work and when it happened worked for me last time that was just a fluke or maybe a quirk of the x4 70 chipset or something like that either way I suspect that I've jumped BIOS version I've gone up to at 40 when I was aiming for F 32 and I'd lost support for my opu which is why it wouldn't work with the apu in it and now we've put in a newer chip it has worked so fine so I definitely think I'm gonna quit while I'm ahead at this point however I don't like that crash we just had and so what I think let's pull out the flash drive and I'm going to get an SSD and a Windows 10 flash drive plugged in and we're gonna see if we can start installing Windows 10 on this thing I'm just going to put away my APU just before that gets damaged because I do leave CPUs lying around but you don't really want to do it long-term the longer it's sitting out for them something is to happen to it okay so what do I need I need a SSD a Windows 10 Drive okay right SSD is connected Windows 10 flash drive is in the back let's turn it on again I don't like that crash your BIOS we had crashes in BIOS is I'm never a good sign but maybe it'll settle out after a couple of boots we have booting windows all right let's do it look oh dear I'm gonna try mam testing this I don't know my name test flash drive is up to date what I think we're gonna do is swap back out to the Patriot round because at this point the Patriot round should work and I think that might saw our issue out these lock ups the this feels like a memory issue to me because it's random and unprompted and there's no reason for it and when that's happening most of the time you've probably got a memory problem no immediate errors and for for a memory module that is well for a system that is crashing during early into the Windows setup if it was memory I would expect to see errors right away so it looks like this is looks like this is a red herring look at that core cam we're into the ABS like that I think we're okay but the next thing I'm gonna try anyway if it locks up again I'm gonna stick the the wraith stealth cooler I've got I've got an AMD Wraith cooler in the box here which I was gonna leave in the box it's not going to get used in the build that I'm doing I've got an all-in-one water cooler to go onto this okay we've had a decent run time in mem test now we haven't gone through the whole test but at this point the system seems to be stable and I have no reason to believe that this memory is faulty right now so I'm gonna go ahead and turn this off again and I'm gonna swap back out the Patriot memory and we're gonna have another go at booting the windows set up the other thing that has occurred to me is the last time I unplugged this Windows 10 flash drive I didn't safely eject it so that might be it as well it'd be really unlucky that was the case but you never know okay in goes the Patriot ramp and this stuff will probably need setting up to get it up to the correct speed it's probably going to start out I like 21 33 or something like that and I'll need to switch on XMP to get it up to 3,600 however I'm not particularly worried about RAM speed right now I just want this system to run so right that looks good power on let's try for the Windows setup again I'm going to be very interested when I actually get to editing this video to see whether whether I'm an whet good god damn it fine attempted to write to read-only memory okay we've got different ramming this time I'm gonna try different windows 10 flash drive okay we're booting with a different Windows 10 flash drive connected now there's got some version of Windows 10 on it I don't know what and I don't really care right now I'm not worried about Windows 10 being up to date this is just this is just a test install to make sure this platform is actually working and again is taking a while to post considering we had a successful poster and a clean shutdown pre well I cut the power I suppose so either way I don't I still don't like the way this board is behaving I'm still not really very happy with it I think we're gonna have to do another BIOS flash on it because I don't like this BIOS version at all I've got all kinds of concerns about it and like originals good when it first posted I was like right we're gonna leave this BIOS version on it because it's working and I'm not gonna risk breaking the board again however right now this platform you know this motherboard and just this setup is all over the place so I think what we're going to do is we're gonna go back to the original plan and we're going to take this thing up to f42 that's Windows 7 no I don't want that gross I'll turn that off you know or sod it I'm gonna go back to the original plan we're doing another BIOS update I have a suspicion that if I've gone straight up to f42 in the first place we wouldn't have had a problem just show you what those LEDs are doing so you see what see what I mean you can see it going round and round there and it's just what are you doing it should just go it should just go CPU DRAM vg8 boot lights go out post it should just go straight through them and switch off and we're going through this summoned dancer every time it starts up okay right we're into bias but I've got my mouse as the system crashed again yeah the system's crashed again good gravy what is wrong with this thing okay I'm gonna get a CPU cooler properly mounted on this just so I just so I can be certain that it's nothing to do with that because we might be getting we might be getting burst here here because like the CPU cooler is cold and if I remove the CPU cooler the chip is tepid at best it's it's basically cold however the thing is is that modern chips can go from 20 degrees to a hundred degrees in less than a second so there's no guarantee that this thing isn't a flashing up to high temperature before the purged CPU cooler can react now I haven't had a problem with that happening in the past when doing BIOS flashes and stuff like that however I've got to consider that that's a possibility and you know like if I were if I were if someone else came into my shop and said and describes this problem I would say you know what kind of cooling have you got on there and they said oh I'm just pulling it I'm just perching a CPU cooler on top of it I'd be like okay that should work but try clamping your CPU cooler so I'm going to take my own advice we've got to remove the AMD clamps because the rate of stealth doesn't use these right power back on right let's do Flair testing first and I'm gonna try the same Windows 10 flash drive that I was previously using and see if the problem has disappeared after clamping the CPU cooler properly because if the problem disappears now then it was an overheating issue and that's completely my bad so let's put that to the test I want a different BIOS on this board that's not right I expect this when I have just changed something but we've had like we've had like three or four posts with this exact hardware configuration now with the graphics card the RAM and the CPU in it I expect this if I've changed the RAM or the CPU I do not expect this if I've had a couple of boots with all this Hardware in there I mean it's starting but he should not be taking that long to post right now that's not right but let's see if it'll let's see if it'll install windows on this SSD I've got a mouse that's a good start and it's different again kernel auto boost lock acquisition with raised I RQL fine unplug the flash drive putting the BIOS flash drive and we'll try and get it back into BIOS and see if I get a mouse the problem is he's like this thing is not stable and trying to do a BIOS flash while it's behaving like this is quite frankly suicidal but and the mouse is locked up again [Music] it hadn't crashed though it was the the counters in the top right we're still changing hmm have we got a ps2 yeah we've got a ps2 port on this right run a computer shop make sure you've got a ps2 keyboard you never know you never know okay and we've probably got a reset for this because ps2 keywords aren't hot swappable sometimes you get away with it but you don't buy spec got what bizarre layout is this keyboard yeah right so we dropped into bias and it's locked up against straightaway and none lock isn't responding either if num lock on your keyboard doesn't respond then that's a really bad sign and I'm guessing we've got no caps lock either you know that's a really low level functions so ps2 keyboard is not helping so it's not a USB issue otherwise we wouldn't be having problems there right I think I'm gonna stop recording for a sec and I'm just gonna leave this thing turned off for an hour I'm just gonna leave it to settle and then we're gonna come back and we're gonna try and flash the BIOS again actually there's one more thing I'm gonna do as well I'm gonna do another bass reset I'm going to drop the I'm gonna drop the RTC battery out of it and we're going to try another BIOS reset and just see if that source it as well I'm just waiting for the stand by rail to go out because there we go my Antec power supply takes quite a while to turn off oh I think I might have done the job though I've got a mouse okay so let's drop back to easy mode so we're on BIOS version f40 and it's crashed I'm turning it off for a while it lasted for a little bit longer it lasted for a little bit longer I think I'm gonna leave it turned off until like at least after my lunch break so we're gonna give it a couple of hours and then we'll come back to it and we'll see if we can just rush through and just smash any BIOS on to that before it locks up again okay it's now a couple of hours later this pins left this thing has been left to sit for a while let's try it again so I've got two choices I can either rush to try and update the BIOS again or I can try and restore the backup BIOS from inside the bias I'm not sure if that is gonna help me or not I'm gonna try and push for a newer BIOS so we're gonna go for the flash if it will let me let's see how this goes power on with black screening again already we didn't even make it into BIOS I don't know what I'm supposed to do here I think I might just have to admit that I've got a bad motherboard went into BIOS and it's just immediately jammed up again no response at all see what I really can't understand is that if I leave it and don't try and go into the BIOS then it's fine I can sit here on no boot device found and it's fine it's just when I go into the BIOS that BIOS file was really screwy and it's really messed this board up but because I can't get into the BIOS I can't do anything about it and that's why I try and do a DOS BIOS flash I hate doing that because to do that I've got to prep a drive up for it and everything we might have to do this bar splash the old-fashioned way where you had to get bootable floppy drive get into a DOS environment and use like you know I can't remember the name of it now but a command line flashing program those were really spooky doing those you had to type in every all the file names correctly and stuff like that back in the bad old days but that might just be a solution to this let's try the boss one more time is there anything I can do to simplify this setup there isn't huh unless I tell you what else I could try doing if I look at the post screen can I jump straight into cue flash from post because that'll work I'm gonna keep an eye on the boss and row of the screen when it comes back round again let's see if this works right is it responsive Edie's responding and then it crashed they responded for it the how it responded for a short amount of time and then it crashed it's right there I'm so close to having this thing working I'm so close to having it working but like even if I was really quick and I went up there by to enter enter enter you know it's not gonna get through the flashing process it's going to lock up halfway through the flash process and then I'll have a corrupted BIOS yeah can you tell me what's in the backup right I'm hacked off with this thing so it's time to get spooky hot air station we're gonna manually swap the BIOS chips around so we're gonna take them both off the board swap them over put them back on again the other way around so what this is gonna do is put the backup BIOS chip here into the main BIOS position so these things they is refusing to do any kind of back virus backup itself so we're gonna do it manually we should find the f2 BIOS on the backup ship so doing it this way I can forcibly revert to the previous BIOS version let's see how this goes okay right I'm gonna leave all that cool off then we'll start it up and we'll see if we've achieved anything or if I'd truly shagged the board although I've done some wacky stunts like this with BIOS chips before they're surprisingly tough gosh hacker I forgot to hit record okay right status update completely forgot to hit the record so it worked we it's we got into bias i sat in the bars for about 20 seconds and it didn't crash so I think what's happened is we're still on BIOS version f40 but I think we had a bad flash on the main BIOS but a good one on the backup BIOS and swapping the chips over seems to have done the trick so because it hasn't crashed what I've done is I've now started a BIOS update up to f41 so we can get off of that really dodging f40 and get on to what should be a known good and touchwood we seem to be ok it has not locked up and the BIOS update is proceeding so just fingers crossed man I think we might be able to salvage this board after all however when I was going in there I checked the filenames again and I had I did not have I had the correct version I did not do anything wrong with this that was a bad download from the gigabyte website so poor show gigabyte you bricked my motherboard on yeah I'm not pulling my punches there anyway let's get this thing through and I think we've salvaged this board now whoo lads the telltale click off the Amtech psu starting up again lose me across is this thing gonna post again after the BIOS update who knows hey I think we're doing all right what did I miss BIOS I think I miss BIOS no its power cycling again that's fine it's allowed to do that first thing after a post okay right bias version f41 so bile splash was successful and I'll leave it on this screen for a moment and just see if we're stable one thing I've noticed is we currently have our memory module plugged into slot one labeled on the motherboard and on the previous version of the BIOS let me just get the thing back up the previous version of Boris I have not moved the memory module from slot one down here previous version it was showing as being in the second slot on that list now it's gone to this slot so they've really messed about in this one they've really shuffled things around that's probably what they were talking about with the for chat with the full memory module support thing I mean we're completely disregarding all of that red text on the gigabyte website now you know like the original plan was just tip toeing around that red text and here we are god knows how long this video is at this point I have no idea I've lost track of time like I'm probably going to be doing a lot of chopping up of all of the footage I've got of this thing not working what what a mess what a absolute mess this has been okay it does team to have posted in a timely fashion this time as well that's another good sign again on the glitchy BIOS post was taking far far too long every single time okay Windows setup so the last time it crashed when I hit next install now we lads I think we've got it oh look at that I don't even have a product key it's thinking about it right I think we're on for a winner here so I'm gonna go ahead and get Windows 10 installed on this thing then after that we'll come back and we'll swap out the memory and I'll probably stick the spire cooler back on top because once I've got a little bit sorted I've got to finish RIF I've got to finish filming the review of this motherboard okay there it is there's the final boot up so we've got Windows we've got our rice and 3600 working and I've also got the original Patriot memory in there it's not running at full speed I've got to dig around in the BIOS and saw all that out but the point is we're actually fixed now so now I can get back to reviewing this thing I think the issue was is that I flashed a bad BIOS and that bad bias was on gigabytes websites oh yeah I'm absolutely blaming them for this one if you've got one of these boards thought all that is holy do not try them but flash f32 go straight to f40 - do not try and do it sequentially just go straight up to the top one however we got there in the end so good gravy all right past that thank you very much for watching everyone I'll see you in the next video which will hopefully be happier videos about this motherboard bye for now you

Channel: Adamant IT

Views: 196,624

Rating: 4.8358097 out of 5

Keywords: adamant it, adamantit, computer, repair, shop, custom, gaming, modding

Id: bOPQAaLlOWA

Length: 42min 23sec (2543 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 25 2019