BIOS Flashing on the TOMAHAWK MAX II B450 board.

[tealflip]

I'll be completely honest. I love hardware, working with it, using it, but oh dear god do BIOS scare the living hell out of me.

Flashing bios to be more specific, which is what I need help with. I have decided to update my bios, especially since I plan in the future to upgrade to a Ryzen 5000 series CPU, with it going down in price hopefully once the 7000 series CPU's come out. But, I have seen mixed info from MSI, both on the manual and tutorials they have posted. They say to use a FAT32 flash drive, which I have a 64gig flash drive formatted into FAT32. Would that work? It also never specifies whether to keep a folder in there, or just paste the bare files in there. Even with MSI's proclaimed EZ bios flashback or whatever, I'm still terrified. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

*before you ask, specs are:*

Ryzen 3 3300x
32 Gigs of Dual Channel 3200mhz ram.
MSI GTX 1660 TI OC
yada yada.

[RONOTHAN##]

If it makes you feel better, BIOS flashback means you basically don't have to worry unless you do something insanely stupid. My system, for example, is running an ASRock X570 Taichi and a 5900X. I've been trying to overclock my RAM recently (dual rank kit of Samsung B die) and I couldn't seem to get 3800MHz anywhere remotely stable (it would black screen whenever Y-Cruncher was even opened), and one of my theories to get it working was to get it to work was to just update the BIOS since I was on the Ryzen 5000 release BIOS still. I downloaded the BIOS file on the flash drive, put it in the system, went in the BIOS and hit flash. Turns out I set all the subtimings back to auto, but didn't change the frequency, so the system hard crashed in the middle of the BIOS update, and no matter how many times I cleared the CMOS it would land on POST code 22. I took out the USB, renamed the BIOS file and did BIOS flashback, and now the system is up and running like nothing ever happened. Moral of the story, don't buy a board without BIOS flashback and/or dual BIOS. 

 

Now to ask some of your questions:

11 minutes ago, tealflip said:

They say to use a FAT32 flash drive, which I have a 64gig flash drive formatted into FAT32. Would that work?

Should be just fine

12 minutes ago, tealflip said:

t also never specifies whether to keep a folder in there, or just paste the bare files in there.

Bare file is preferred, but I've used ones with other files before without issues. With BIOS flashback you do need to have a clean drive though.

12 minutes ago, tealflip said:

Even with MSI's proclaimed EZ bios flashback or whatever, I'm still terrified.

Don't be, just make sure you aren't doing it in a thunderstorm or any other time you're system is likely to lose power, do a CMOS clear and a reboot before you do it (so you don't brick your BIOS chip with bad settings like I did), and you should be great. 

[tealflip]

3 minutes ago, RONOTHAN## said:

(so you don't brick your BIOS chip with bad settings like I did)

If I kept most settings the same, other than simple ram overclocking, with AMD-V on for vm's, I should be just fine right?
 

5 minutes ago, RONOTHAN## said:

I took out the USB, renamed the BIOS file and did BIOS flashback

Does the usb have to be named anything particular? And do you know if the TOMAHAWK series of boards have BIOS flashback or multiple bios's? *sorry to keep asking questions but I'm making sure for certain I know what to do*

[Lemtea]

Bios flashing is generally quite a safe procedure as long as the flash progress isn't interrupted (power outage etc.). Here is a link to the MSI guide for bios flashing.

 

While you can use the bios flashback feature I would suggest a standard flash as you already have a cpu installed. Make sure before you update that the new bios still supports your current cpu properly (it is common for some of the amd boards to drop support for older cpus on newer bios versions).

 

Also if you have a smaller capacity usb drive (8 or 16gb), I would suggest using that (formatted as FAT32) . In some circumstances larger capacity drives can have detection issues (won't hurt anything, just fails to show up in bios flash or read).

[RONOTHAN##]

1 minute ago, tealflip said:

If I kept most settings the same, other than simple ram overclocking, with AMD-V on for vm's, I should be just fine right?

It's still best practice to clear the CMOS before you do anyway, since you'll have to re-enable those settings anyway. 

 

3 minutes ago, tealflip said:

Does the usb have to be named anything particular?

In order to use BIOS flashback, the file needs to be named. The board looks for a certain filename when flashing the BIOS, so if the file is the default name it won't be detected. I'm pretty sure it's MSI.ROM for MSI boards, but quite frankly don't feel like downloading the manual and looking it up for that board. 

 

5 minutes ago, tealflip said:

And do you know if the TOMAHAWK series of boards have BIOS flashback or multiple bios's?

It has BIOS flashback, it does not have dual BIOS. If you were only gonna have one, that would probably be the better one to have (at least on AM4). Dual BIOS is usually limited to the high end motherboards with its biggest advantages over BIOS flashback being able to quickly back to back test multiple BIOS versions and being able to survive a BIOS chip failing. BIOS flashback lets you recover most BIOS chips getting bricked (more likely than a full on failure) with the advantage of being able to update the BIOS without a supported CPU. Ideally you have both, but that's expensive (only high end Gigabyte and EVGA motherboards on AM4 I'm aware actually have proper dual BIOS support) and having only one of the two features is more than fine. 

[tealflip]

7 minutes ago, RONOTHAN## said:

It's still best practice to clear the CMOS before you do anyway, since you'll have to re-enable those settings anyway. 

 

In order to use BIOS flashback, the file needs to be named. The board looks for a certain filename when flashing the BIOS, so if the file is the default name it won't be detected. I'm pretty sure it's MSI.ROM for MSI boards, but quite frankly don't feel like downloading the manual and looking it up for that board. 

 

It has BIOS flashback, it does not have dual BIOS. If you were only gonna have one, that would probably be the better one to have (at least on AM4). Dual BIOS is usually limited to the high end motherboards with its biggest advantages over BIOS flashback being able to quickly back to back test multiple BIOS versions and being able to survive a BIOS chip failing. BIOS flashback lets you recover most BIOS chips getting bricked (more likely than a full on failure) with the advantage of being able to update the BIOS without a supported CPU. Ideally you have both, but that's expensive (only high end Gigabyte and EVGA motherboards on AM4 I'm aware actually have proper dual BIOS support) and having only one of the two features is more than fine. 

Im on my phone, i decided to go a slower approach with M-FLASH, so i selected the file instead of it doing so on its own. I can only trust computers to a certain extent. Thank you so much again, both of you for clearing a lot of my fear.

edit: Back on the pc, bios flashback went by fine, again thank you guys for your help.