8 ms·

Upgrading a motherboard’s BIOS/UEFI (the hard way)

103 points by zdw 5y ago

snvzz 5y ago
It used to be the case BIOS were socketed. Now, there's no socket, no header (not even the footprint for it) and of course no microcontroller-based flash method. It would cost them literal cents to do, but they don't. It's a shame.
- RicoElectrico 5y ago
  There's a connector called Tag-Connect which is actually only a PCB footprint with holes, so you get it for "free".
  - mmastrac 5y ago
    That is super cool. Thanks for the reference. The TTL footprint would have saved me a ton of hassle on a recent project.
  - Namidairo 5y ago
    Obviously there are generic solutions without the PCB alignment holes (and aren't patented), if you need something along those lines. Although I think clips are roughly the same price if you go that route as well.
  - pantalaimon 5y ago
    The Tag-Connect cable on the other hand is anything but free. I'm surprised there is no competition
    - tuankiet65 5y ago
      Yep, last time I took a look at the cable price they're pretty outrageous. I suppose they only make money on cables, not connectors - hence the markup. And it seems like the Tag-Connect is patented, which is why nobody has tried to make a clone of it?
- Gigachad 5y ago
  A socketed chip is hardly any easier to program when the clip works fine. It's also an extra cost added to millions of units which maybe 1-10 customers will ever actually make use of. It's just cheaper to offer a program to mail the boards in to be flashed.
  - ak217 5y ago
    Back when BIOS chips were socketed, I once flashed the wrong BIOS onto my motherboard's chip, so it wouldn't boot. Luckily I also had an older motherboard with the same BIOS chip model. So I booted up the old one, pulled its chip out while it was running, put the new one in and flashed the new board's version - without using any special tools at all.
  - snvzz 5y ago
    >when the clip works fine The clip is a hack. And it also does assume there's a diode to protect the board from back-feeding power, or else you have to turn on the board and do it warm, which has its own issues. When the flash chip isn't socketed, it would cost literally nothing to provide the footprint for a programming header. Just SPI on a header. That there isn't one is pretty much the middle finger to their customers. >It's also an extra cost added to millions of units which maybe 1-10 customers will ever actually make use of. It's just cheaper to offer a program to mail the boards in to be flashed. Negligible cost for just a header, even less so for a footprint. It's not about these 1-10 customers, but about local repair shops (or any friendly tech guy) being able to do this. Much better than a mailback.
    - floatboth 5y ago
      There are SPI headers for flashing on many many desktop mainboards.
  - TedDoesntTalk 5y ago
    With socketed BIOS chips, You could buy preprogrammed updates… no need to program yourself.
- fredoralive 5y ago
  More expensive motherboards do have (presumably) MCU based flash tools so you can upgrade the motherboard via USB without a CPU. But this is a low end A series chipset board, it's going to be designed to be cheap, so extraneous features like that aren't going to be fitted. There probably is also some sort of "header" to allow programming Flash in the factory, but it's going to be a set of test pads that need a "bed of nails" or similar to use. I suppose you could standardise it and make it easier to field use (others mention tag-connect cables), but it's such a niche use case I'm not sure anyone would spend the time on standardising it.
digitallyfree 5y ago
Lucky that he was able to use a clip - the power draw of the other components on the board sometimes overwhelms the programmer and causes the voltage to sag. When my BIOS failed I was unable to use a clip and had to desolder (don't have hot air equipment). Ended up pulling off one of the pads under the SOIC8 BIOS chip and had to reroute the pin of the newly programmed chip to another point on the board. Also props to the writer for mentioning the fact that the CH341A drives the flash chip with 5V rather than 3.3V without modification. Many sites don't mention that and that can destroy a 3.3V chip. I believe the datasheet for my Winbond chip mentioned that the limit was 4.3V or something like that. I only figured that out when I probed the programmer's signals as a sanity check before programming.
userbinator 5y ago
No worries – I was carefully monitoring the CPU temperature with my finger. That was a bit cringeworthy as someone who remembers the old TomsHardware video, and knows how rapidly new CPUs can change temperature/power consumption. You might end up with a damaged CPU, finger, or both. The amount of thermal mass relative to the power dissipation is tiny, and the BIOS definitely isn't going to put the CPU in power-saving mode right out of reset. I strongly recommend never powering on a "bare CPU" without a heatsink on it for anything newer than a (original) Pentium. Not having a working fan on the heatsink is not as bad, since the heatsink has plenty of thermal mass.
- 14 5y ago
  I disagree. This seems to me to be the heart of tinkering. We don't always have the tools we need so sometimes improvise and especially since it was a cheap board and he knew the risks it seems perfectly fine to me. If everything needed to be perfect every time a lot of things would never happen. I smiled at that part of the story.
  - userbinator 5y ago
    He had a heatsink; just didn't bother to put it on: Success! I cleaned off the CPU with alcohol because I had been touching it, and fully installed the heatsink/fan.
- ComputerGuru 5y ago
  Modern CPUs will throttle or halt long before they fry themselves.
  - userbinator 5y ago
    They have throttling, and the newer ones are definitely "thermally governed", but without a heatsink to provide thermal mass, I'm not sure if they can react quickly enough to stop going over the limits. That said, a CPU with a heatspreader will have more mass than a bare die.
bumblebritches5 5y ago
I had a similar issue like 5 years ago. I just called up ASUS and shipped the board to them, I paid the shipping cost and they reprogrammed the BIOS for free, besides shipping.
ananonymoususer 5y ago
I wonder if it would have been easier to use a JTAG probe to read/write the BIOS. I would be surprised if the motherboard didn't have a JTAG port.
- dougg3 5y ago
  It does have an SPI TPM header, which as far as I was able to tell, does bring out all of the signals I needed (including the BIOS chip select). But it's just all of the same signals in a different form factor. It was actually easier to use the chip clip because I didn't have header pins small enough to plug into it. It would be nice if the motherboard manufacturers would standardize on a header (or footprint) that everyone would use...
unbanned 5y ago
- amenonsen 5y ago
  Yes, isn't it great? As someone who knew that it's possible to reflash BIOS chips, but had no idea what equipment or process it would take to actually do so, I really appreciated the detailed explanation of the steps involved and (more so) the various potential problems that the author thought about and addressed along the way.

103 points by zdw 5y ago

It used to be the case BIOS were socketed. Now, there's no socket, no header (not even the footprint for it) and of course no microcontroller-based flash method. It would cost them literal cents to do, but they don't. It's a shame.

RicoElectrico 5y ago
There's a connector called Tag-Connect which is actually only a PCB footprint with holes, so you get it for "free".
- mmastrac 5y ago
  That is super cool. Thanks for the reference. The TTL footprint would have saved me a ton of hassle on a recent project.
- Namidairo 5y ago
  Obviously there are generic solutions without the PCB alignment holes (and aren't patented), if you need something along those lines. Although I think clips are roughly the same price if you go that route as well.
- pantalaimon 5y ago
  The Tag-Connect cable on the other hand is anything but free. I'm surprised there is no competition
  - tuankiet65 5y ago
    Yep, last time I took a look at the cable price they're pretty outrageous. I suppose they only make money on cables, not connectors - hence the markup. And it seems like the Tag-Connect is patented, which is why nobody has tried to make a clone of it?
Gigachad 5y ago
A socketed chip is hardly any easier to program when the clip works fine. It's also an extra cost added to millions of units which maybe 1-10 customers will ever actually make use of. It's just cheaper to offer a program to mail the boards in to be flashed.
- ak217 5y ago
  Back when BIOS chips were socketed, I once flashed the wrong BIOS onto my motherboard's chip, so it wouldn't boot. Luckily I also had an older motherboard with the same BIOS chip model. So I booted up the old one, pulled its chip out while it was running, put the new one in and flashed the new board's version - without using any special tools at all.
- snvzz 5y ago
  >when the clip works fine The clip is a hack. And it also does assume there's a diode to protect the board from back-feeding power, or else you have to turn on the board and do it warm, which has its own issues. When the flash chip isn't socketed, it would cost literally nothing to provide the footprint for a programming header. Just SPI on a header. That there isn't one is pretty much the middle finger to their customers. >It's also an extra cost added to millions of units which maybe 1-10 customers will ever actually make use of. It's just cheaper to offer a program to mail the boards in to be flashed. Negligible cost for just a header, even less so for a footprint. It's not about these 1-10 customers, but about local repair shops (or any friendly tech guy) being able to do this. Much better than a mailback.
  - floatboth 5y ago
    There are SPI headers for flashing on many many desktop mainboards.
- TedDoesntTalk 5y ago
  With socketed BIOS chips, You could buy preprogrammed updates… no need to program yourself.
fredoralive 5y ago
More expensive motherboards do have (presumably) MCU based flash tools so you can upgrade the motherboard via USB without a CPU. But this is a low end A series chipset board, it's going to be designed to be cheap, so extraneous features like that aren't going to be fitted. There probably is also some sort of "header" to allow programming Flash in the factory, but it's going to be a set of test pads that need a "bed of nails" or similar to use. I suppose you could standardise it and make it easier to field use (others mention tag-connect cables), but it's such a niche use case I'm not sure anyone would spend the time on standardising it.

digitallyfree 5y ago

Lucky that he was able to use a clip - the power draw of the other components on the board sometimes overwhelms the programmer and causes the voltage to sag. When my BIOS failed I was unable to use a clip and had to desolder (don't have hot air equipment). Ended up pulling off one of the pads under the SOIC8 BIOS chip and had to reroute the pin of the newly programmed chip to another point on the board. Also props to the writer for mentioning the fact that the CH341A drives the flash chip with 5V rather than 3.3V without modification. Many sites don't mention that and that can destroy a 3.3V chip. I believe the datasheet for my Winbond chip mentioned that the limit was 4.3V or something like that. I only figured that out when I probed the programmer's signals as a sanity check before programming.

userbinator 5y ago

No worries – I was carefully monitoring the CPU temperature with my finger. That was a bit cringeworthy as someone who remembers the old TomsHardware video, and knows how rapidly new CPUs can change temperature/power consumption. You might end up with a damaged CPU, finger, or both. The amount of thermal mass relative to the power dissipation is tiny, and the BIOS definitely isn't going to put the CPU in power-saving mode right out of reset. I strongly recommend never powering on a "bare CPU" without a heatsink on it for anything newer than a (original) Pentium. Not having a working fan on the heatsink is not as bad, since the heatsink has plenty of thermal mass.

14 5y ago
I disagree. This seems to me to be the heart of tinkering. We don't always have the tools we need so sometimes improvise and especially since it was a cheap board and he knew the risks it seems perfectly fine to me. If everything needed to be perfect every time a lot of things would never happen. I smiled at that part of the story.
- userbinator 5y ago
  He had a heatsink; just didn't bother to put it on: Success! I cleaned off the CPU with alcohol because I had been touching it, and fully installed the heatsink/fan.
ComputerGuru 5y ago
Modern CPUs will throttle or halt long before they fry themselves.
- userbinator 5y ago
  They have throttling, and the newer ones are definitely "thermally governed", but without a heatsink to provide thermal mass, I'm not sure if they can react quickly enough to stop going over the limits. That said, a CPU with a heatspreader will have more mass than a bare die.

bumblebritches5 5y ago

I had a similar issue like 5 years ago. I just called up ASUS and shipped the board to them, I paid the shipping cost and they reprogrammed the BIOS for free, besides shipping.

ananonymoususer 5y ago

I wonder if it would have been easier to use a JTAG probe to read/write the BIOS. I would be surprised if the motherboard didn't have a JTAG port.

dougg3 5y ago
It does have an SPI TPM header, which as far as I was able to tell, does bring out all of the signals I needed (including the BIOS chip select). But it's just all of the same signals in a different form factor. It was actually easier to use the chip clip because I didn't have header pins small enough to plug into it. It would be nice if the motherboard manufacturers would standardize on a header (or footprint) that everyone would use...

unbanned 5y ago

amenonsen 5y ago
Yes, isn't it great? As someone who knew that it's possible to reflash BIOS chips, but had no idea what equipment or process it would take to actually do so, I really appreciated the detailed explanation of the steps involved and (more so) the various potential problems that the author thought about and addressed along the way.