is widely known, at least my MSI enthusiasts and owners, as a downright pain in the behind.

Now that I’ve introduced the basic premise around which the premise revolves, a few terms should ideally be introduced to the uninitiated. You can find some background reading here. But that’s not enough. There’s more you need to know before you can go about flashing your BIOS.

As I mentioned in the linked post, the BIOS forms the very core of your computer. Look at this way, your programs and applications can tell your computer what you want and what to do, but ultimately, it is the BIOS which will make everything come together. It knows how to do stuff. It along with certain components like the northbridge and southbridge control the flow of data and instructions among RAM, processor, hard drive, GPU etc. So, it provides the essential base on which everything else operates. It may just be around 1MB, but it’s the most important MB of code in the entire computer. The BIOS usually resides on a ROM chip on your motherboard, one that may either fit into a socket, or one which is soldered onto the board itself.

The reason I’m going to such lengths to explain exactly what the BIOS is for is simple : If your OS goes, fine, you can reinstall it, but if you manage to corrupt, irrevocably, your BIOS, you’re in for a pretty bad time. Do not, I repeat, DO NOT flash your BIOS unless you’re absolutely certain about what you’re doing. You can definitely post comments for help, if you need any, but I won’t accept any responsibility for what end up doing.

One more thing, the reason why the term ‘flashing the BIOS’ is used is because the BIOS is on an EEPROM (Electrically Erasable Programmable Read-Only Memory), and to erase its predecessor, EPROM (Erasable Programmable Read-Only Memory) was erased by exposing it, or flashing, to ultra-violet light.

Anyway, there really is not need as of such to flash your BIOS, unless you’re experience some system crashes. Not OS crashes and applications hanging, that’s usually an OS problem or a virus or something. I’m talking about multiple BSODs (Blue Screen of Death). It’s a pseudo-technical term at best – whenever the OS encounters a fatal system error (i.e. one it cannot recover from), it gives a blue screen, detailing the error, usually concurrently dumping the physical memory for later debugging, and then reboots your PC for you. I’ve been having a few of them lately, so I was wondering if the BIOS had anything to do with it.

Now, on my old PC (Dick), the motherboard was an Asus A8N-E. And Asus provided a nifty little program which, if pointed to the correct BIOS file (which could be downloaded from the ASUS website) would flash the BIOS for you, from within the Windows environment. This is quite useful, especially if you’re not very experienced in these matters. The traditional way of flashing the BIOS is creating a bootable floppy disk with the BIOS file and a small application to flash the EEPROM.

Anyway, even MSI offers such a software. It’s called LiveUpdate, which, purportedly takes care of all my driver and BIOS updating needs. That’s just a bunch of lies, because the software consistently fails to detect the new version of the BIOS which is available for download from the MSI website. So I won’t even bother to provide a download link for that piece of shit software. Plus, even MSI veterans agree that even if you do manage to find your update on LiveUpdate, it’s best not to use LiveUpdate to flash your BIOS.

There are 2 alternatives : creating a bootable floppy, or creating a bootable USB drive. Since this is 2010, I’ll stick to the second option. First of all, you’ll need to download some software to help create a bootable USB drive. I suggest HP’s USB Disk Storage Format Tool. A mouthful indeed, but the utility weighs in under 2 MB. You can download it here, from PCWorld.

Once you’ve installed that, make sure you’ve got your BIOS at hand. I’ve got a MSI NF980-G65, so I go to the MSI Download Centre, search for my motherboard, and then find the latest BIOS update.

Another thing, since most PCs now don’t run an old MS-DOS based OS like Windows 98, you’ll need to download the MS-DOS boot files. You can download the Windows 98 SE boot files from here (courtesy AllBootDisks.com).

Once that’s done, use a decompression utility like WinRAR, found here, to decompress the .ISO file. There should be 24 files in the ISO. Make sure your extract the files to a directory with no other files in it.

Once that’s done, start the USB Disk Storage Format Tool. If you haven’t plugged in a USB drive, all fields will be greyed out. Once you’ve plugged it in, it’ll show up under Devices. Leave the file system as FAT32, and make sure that the Create a DOS startup disk option is checked. For most people, the first option under it will be greyed out, because Windows Vista and Windows 7 don’t run on top of MS-DOS, unlike Windows 98. Instead, with the second sub-option selected, navigate to the folder where you extracted the ISO files. Click on Start, and wait for the formatting process to finish.

Once that’s done, navigate to the BIOS file which you downloaded off the MSI website. It’ll most likely be a ZIP file. There are 2 important files in it, AFUDxxxx.exe, where xxxx is a series of 4 digits, and AxxxxIMS.xxx, where the first set of x’s pertain to your motherboard, and the second set is the version of the BIOs. The first file is the Flash Utility, which does the actual flashing, whereas the second file is the actual BIOS file, which gets copied to the onboard ROM. Copy these 2 files to the root directory of the USB drive. Root means that it shouldn’t be in a subdirectory in the USB drive. Don’t be alarmed because you can’t see the ISO files, they’re hidden from view for the moment.

Now, you’re almost done. Reboot your PC, and if necessary, interrupt the boot sequence to select a boot device. The key to do so is displayed briefly during POST. Select the USB drive. Now, you’ll see a MS-DOS command prompt. Type in dir. That will display the list of all files (apart from the boot files). Next, type in AFUDxxxx AxxxxIMS.xxx, according to the files you have. Optionally, add /REBOOT  to the end of the command to restart your PC.

The flashing process won’t take long, and if nothing goes wrong, you’re BIOS will be successfully updated.

Things that can go wrong

• Your electrical supply is disrupted. This could mean curtains for your PC, or just a simple matter of BIOS recovery. Since I’m can’t be bothered to detail the recovery process in this post, I suggest you use a UPS or something.
• You get impatient, waiting for the utility to complete the flashing process, and restart your PC, in which case you are a retard.

That concludes a relatively long-winded post about something which pertains to a tiny percent of the world’s population, which is a subset of a tiny percent of computer enthusiasts anyways. Hope to get back to the real world sooner or later…

Tags: BIOS, MSI