Recover from failed BIOS Flash via USB

[clayzim]

Hello!

First time building and I've run into some issues. I had a successful post with no video. I didn't have a spare cable or monitor on hand. Some search results suggested that there could be a BIOS incompatibility with my video card. Not realizing how highs takes a BIOS flash is, I followed the instructions in the manual. First try, I got a solid red LED instead of a successful flash. On subsequent attempts,  I've gotten five slow blinks of the red LED then nothing. Both sequences occur after the BIOS Flash feature powers the board on.

 

According to MadSky in this thread in the MSI forums, this suggests that first try my file system was wrong (probably, it didn't mention anything in the manual). And that subsequently the flash drive was not recognized.

 

I've tried with two different flash drives, both USB 2.0. One 4GB Kingston Data Traveler and one 8GB Rocketfish. Those are the only two I have right now. I don't currently have access to a working Windows PC and my laptop is an ARM Mac. So I've tried various tricks in macOS Disk Utility, dd, gparted, Linux tools like fdisk in a VM. I can only emulate a Windows box, since I'm not on an x86 architecture, which is brutally slow to even get through setup.

 

My current hope is that if I can configure my same physical flash drive fresh in diskpart on Windows, it will be properly recognized by my motherboard's BIOS Flash feature. I'm hoping to follow the diskpart instructions provided by Alan J T in this thread in the MSI forums.

 

Alternatively, I'm considering buying the exact flash drive that was used in this video, since he seems to have good success.

 

Motherboard is MSI B550M PRO-VDH WIFI

 

Thanks for any help! Let me know if other information would be helpful. For example, I could create a video of the attempt at flashing the BIOS to give a clearer idea of what's going on.

[clayzim]

To be clear, my EZ Debug LEDs were previously flashing in various patterns and then settling on BOOT, which seems appropriate, since I haven't installed an OS yet. After the first failed BIOS Flash attempt, the CPU LED lights up solid and nothing else flashes on or off. My best guess is that my BIOS is currently in a bad state and that's not letting the POST proceed.