USB Flashing MSI Motherboard

[viin]

Hey gang! First time round these parts but I'm hoping for some help.

 

You see my dad is building his first (budget) gaming computer in 8 years and we've run into a snag and are hoping to find out what we are doing wrong.

 

My dad is a bit of a deal hunter and found a bundled cpu and motherboard online and bought them.

 

the motherboard is a MSI MAG B650 Tomahawk

 

The cpu is a AMD Ryzen 9 7900X3D

 

This motherboard supports this cpu, but only after the bios is updated on the board, which seemed like it was going to be simple. Seemed.

 

I had told my dad about this conflict but he was confident we could put our heads together and get through it since there was already an update and all.

 

It hasn't worked out. We can't get this thing to flash.

 

We have tried 3 different usb drives all formatted to fat32 and with the update file relabelled to MSI.ROM and specifically put it in the usb slot labeled for bios flash and made sure the machine was off before pushing the bios flash button to start the process, the motherboard only recognized one of the 3 drives we tried and we stuck with the one it recognized.

 

We tried stepping down to specifically the file that is supposed to give the compatibility to the board (7D75v14) instead of latest, again making sure to rename it and drop it in a completely empty fat32 drive.

 

We made sure the drive is MRB.

 

We took out everything. My dad was so excited he stuck everything in the computer before I got off work but we took everything back out after reading it will make the flash fail.

 

we made sure the drive being used is usb 3.0

 

The usb is being recognized and the white light on the board blinks for around 7 to 9 minutes while it seems to be flashing the bios. Half the time it has turned a solid white light, and the other half of the time the light goes off entirely though the board itself is still on, we can tell because the diagnostic lights on the motherboard saying it doesn't have a gpu and doesn't like the cpu are still on.

 

turning the board off and on after the times where the bios flash light turned completely off (even after waiting up to 10 minutes extra) that red light of not liking the cpu is still on the board so the flash obviously did not take correctly.

 

 I'll be real, I don't really do the whole deal hunting thing so I've always just bought parts that work together out of the box so this is unfamiliar ground for me and I've already spent around 10 hours working with my dad just on trying to get this thing updated.

 

What are we doing wrong?

[JonS77]

Honestly there isn't much to it, you just have to follow this video step by step, put the USB device in the correct slot and press the button. This shouldn't really be complicated unless something is wrong with your USB drive or your board. It's a pretty straight forward process and maybe you just need to follow the video step by step with a fresh mind and have the correct bios file downloaded from the support page.

 

 

[kitnoman]

Personally, I really don't turn off and on the power button while flashing a bios. I would even force myself to eat something or leave it for 30mins or an hour, in fear of bricking the motherboard by forcing a restart while it's flashing. However, first question though, have you tried to boot the cpu? if I remember correctly, it should boot with the unsupported bios as the newer once are just for the voltage management/stability(I believed). So you can try to boot it and update the though the bios.

[viin]

Hey! we have tried booting it with the cpu in and it won't boot at all. Not into the bios screen or anything. we get no output on the screen at all with or without a gpu installed and we tried the gou from my working system as well just to check that. The motherboard actually won't even boot far enough to turn itself off? like pushing the power button turns it on but then pushing it again won't turn it off and it is the motherboard as I brought my machine down and hooked the power switch into my own computer with a couple extendors and it worked to turn that machine both on and off flawlessly.

 

Is it unusual that it won't boot at all?

5 minutes ago, kitnoman said:

Personally, I really don't turn off and on the power button while flashing a bios. I would even force myself to eat something or leave it for 30mins or an hour, in fear of bricking the motherboard by forcing a restart while it's flashing. However, first question though, have you tried to boot the cpu? if I remember correctly, it should boot with the unsupported bios as the newer once are just for the voltage management/stability(I believed). So you can try to boot it and update the though the bios.

 

[viin]

21 minutes ago, Jon-Slow said:

Honestly there isn't much to it, you just have to follow this video step by step, put the USB device in the correct slot and press the button. This shouldn't really be complicated unless something is wrong with your USB drive or your board. It's a pretty straight forward process and maybe you just need to follow the video step by step with a fresh mind and have the correct bios file downloaded from the support page.

 

 

I appreciate what you are trying to do here, truly, but I have followed this video. actually. I have followed multiple videos from articles I found on reddit, on the msi forums, on other more esoteric computer forums that popped up while I was desperately searching for what I am missing, and none of them have provided clarity on what is going on.

 

I understand it is supposed to be a simple process but obviously that isn't the case for me. If I'm missing an obvious step could you kindly just tell me instead of linking me a video I have already watched multiple times to see if I "get it this time" please?

[kitnoman]

It's the first boot for ryzen. How long did you guys wait? But as far as I know, at least for a friend of mine, it worked. He also got an MSI board, but not sure if it's a tomahawk.

[viin]

So just as an update, we need up calling MSI, they asked a couple questions and then said "yup that board isn't working right." and told us to return the product. So apparently I wasn't crazy my dad just bought a defective board.