Saving Christmas

As the resident geek (and therefore tech support for friends, family and strangers on the street) I find myself busy this time of year helping out with recommendations, tech support, etc.

This year was a fairly quiet one, and the only callout I had was to help my cousin and fellow geek Maclean. He had got an RTX 5060 and a 2TB SSD for his PC and wanted a hand installing it, and since I'm still rocking a 2070S I was looking forward to seeing that thing run.

A GPU swap and SSD install are some of the most trivial upgrades you can make to a computer, so I bring along a screwdriver and some other bits just in case and we get to work. We remove the 780ti he was limping along with (RIP) and swap in the new parts, taking the time to explain the process and go over what component does what, all good—time to test

We hit the power button and -

Silent Night, Deadly Fright

No video output. Okay, alarming but anyone who's built a PC knows you can forget silly things, so we do some basic diagnoses:
- Re-Seat RAM, GPU, Cabling - Clear CMOS - Try different video outputs

But no luck, at this point I'm a bit more concerned, but assume something is wrong with the new card so I throw the old one back in - and it POSTs fine!

I tried checking the BIOS config for anything that could cause this, but no luck. I can't try booting without a GPU either as the CPU in this system has no iGPU, configuration all points to PCIe Graphics and the RTX card should work fine.

At this point I recall when I got my first 'real' GPU, an AMD 5850 which I had similar issues with and returned for a GTX 470 which ended up having the same issue. It was at that point I realized my BIOS needed an update to work with these GPUs and there was probably nothing wrong with the 5850, but we live and learn.

So naturally I assume the same here, I check the Gigabyte download center and sure enough they have numerous updates available.

So I format my keyring USB to fat32, copy all of the bios updates over and load up Q-Flash in the BIOS. Q-Flash at first surprises me by rejecting F67 as invalid, even though the SHA is correct, so I try F51 as we are currently on F50 and it seems like a logical choice.

Q-Flash verifies the bin file, I take a backup and proceed with the flash and the system reboots.

Merry Bricks-mas

The machine reboots and no video output again, same behavior as before with fans spinning, USB accessories lighting up, no POST beeps but no video either.

At this point I'm concerned, not only has the new GPU not worked, the old one no longer works and there is no iGPU to fall back on, so the system is effectively bricked.

I begin googling and sure enough there are countless reports of the same thing with this motherboard.

Personally I find this crazy that this can even happen on a semi-modern board, budget or otherwise. I haven't seen a BIOS update brick a motherboard this millennium, and while this might be a 'soft-brick' and could maybe be circumvented with the right hardware (iGPU CPU) I am honestly shocked Q-Flash even allows this scenario to happen - I've seen unsupported homebrew written by teenagers with better recovery procedures

There is no supported recovery path for this issue, no rollback, no emergency boot, nothing. Most posters on the internet indicate they had to buy a new board. At this point I had to concede defeat and take the machine home to further diagnose.

Flashing through the snow

I previously mentioned there are no supported recovery methods for this, but that doesn't mean it's a goner yet.

The BIOS is just code stored on a chip on the motherboard, fancier motherboards allow this chip to be removed or will even have two just in case one goes bad due to a bad update or bad user config.

This is not one of those motherboards though, so I would need to find a different way to fix it. To do this I ordered a CH341A USB Programmer. This thing can connect to the chip directly by using the included clip to grip onto the chip and talk to it directly, ignoring everything else.

With this and some helpful youtube videos, I was able to get a connection going via asProgrammer and read the existing BIOS. I was very grateful to see this as it meant there was hope and the motherboard wasn't dead yet.

I decided at this point to go full in, and erase the chips memory (after taking a backup, of course) back to zeros and then flash a fresh F67 (latest) BIOS

Then I rather optimistically put the 5060 back in, and pulled out my phone and hit the power button

Christmas is saved, and I got an excuse to buy a CH341A.