MSI BIOS Flash

[Elon Mosque]

Hello everyone, I wanted to share my recent experience with MSI's BIOS flash feature without the need of an CPU.

Basically my friend wanted to swap his Intel build to a Ryzen one but since x570 motherboards were out of his budget he ordered MSI B450 Gaming Plus (which has this feature so he counted on this) and a R5 3600. He asked me to install it yesterday.

Before I put the new motherboard I followed everything the manual said with for flashing the latest bios, with the new flashing method and everything was looking as its supposed to be. After I put everything and turned on. The GPU fans were %100 and no display, the debug led was showing there was CPU error.

I thought why not try again and flashed again and with no avail it didn't work. This wasn't my first Ryzen build either. Thanks to this useless feature we had to waste an entire day, take the case to the car and went to another friend to take his 2600x from his system and put to this new one just to flash the bios...

So TLDR: To everyone who plans to make an build B450+3000 series, either wait for updated B450 motherboards or you need a CPU to update because right now MSI's method doesn't work.

[Elon Mosque]

Ursprungligen skrivet av Bad 💀 Motha:

Again, look through the pdf manual and understand your boards features before you buy it.

And yes it does work on most boards, even B350 boards. But again not all boards will have this flash feature when cpu and ram are not present.

Uhm the fact that they specifically say that there is no need for a CPU or anything else, what am I missing here? I read the page personally by myself. There is a clear issue with this feature. My only mistake was not searching for issues regarding to this feature before. Apart from that I did my research correct.

[Bad 💀 Motha]

Well you never explained how you performed the update. So look, all we can suggest is you did it wrong somehow, or the board itself might be faulty.

I've seen with some models of boards where they have stated that once you extract the latest bios to the flash drive, to also then rename the bios update file to a certain filename, otherwise the flash method won't be able to see the file. Also on many of such boards, only a certain usb port can be used also for this type of process.

[Elon Mosque]

Ursprungligen skrivet av Bad 💀 Motha:

Well you never explained how you performed the update. So look, all we can suggest is you did it wrong somehow, or the board itself might be faulty.

I've seen with some models of boards where they have stated that once you extract the latest bios to the flash drive, to also then rename the bios update file to a certain filename, otherwise the flash method won't be able to see the file. Also on many of such boards, only a certain usb port can be used also for this type of process.

I did rename the file to MSI.ROM and the drive only contained that particular file. And I have looked at the I/O cover to find out which USB port corresponds to the Flashback one.
Edit: I saw some people having success with smaller USB drives but I'm not sure how it's related, anyways.

[Bad 💀 Motha]

Does MSI say to format the usb flash drive a certain way? Such as fat16, fat32, ntfs, exfat???

[Elon Mosque]

Ursprungligen skrivet av Bad 💀 Motha:

Does MSI say to format the usb flash drive a certain way? Such as fat16, fat32, ntfs, exfat???

Fat 32, It was formatted to Fat 32 before using it for updating.

[Elon Mosque]

Wanted to do an update. There is an new version of Flashback Firmware maybe that fixes the issues there are no release notes atm.

[OLDMAN🎅]

Never had any problems BIOS Flashing any msi z board and I had 2 of them

System MSI MS-7A59
Motherboard MSI Z270 GAMING PRO (MS-7A59) (all builds)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRyFMf0D9Lc