Dieser Bereich kann Inhalte enthalten, die nicht für alle Nutzer geeignet sind. Dazu können unter anderem Texte, Medien oder Diskussionen gehören, die als beleidigend, extremistisch, gewaltbezogen oder anderweitig belastend empfunden werden. Wenn du solche Inhalte nicht sehen möchtest, nutze bitte die jeweiligen Filter- und Meldeoptionen der Plattform oder meide entsprechende Threads/Communities.
Ever since I bought a desktop motherboard with a secondary BIOS/UEFI ROM, I’ll never buy one without it again. The peace of mind alone is worth any extra cost. And it has saved me from failed flashes twice.
Hadn’t heard of this. Is it fairly easy to come by now? Can’t afford to upgrade anytime soon, but hopefully in a year or two if the memory market ever stabilizes.
Usually only on top end mbs. Some cheaper ones have a bios recovery tho, which should achieve the same results
It is more common now. I’ve seen two implementations of it:
These are not standard, and not major selling points, so different manufacturers have different implementations and unfortunately different names for it. You have to do some reading, and it might not be mentioned in the product listing, you might have to find the manual to read the full specs. Your motherboard might even already have this feature without you knowing it. Does it have a button like this?
Or this (the BIOS_FLBK one, not the CLR_CMOS in the red box)
If you are buying a new board, the little two-digit display in that second picture is also a nice feature. It’s a POST error code display. Rather than just getting some beeps during a POST failure, it will give you an error code that you can look up to figure out what the specific problem area is (e.g. RAM not fully inserted, clock mismatch, etc).
I’ve had three boards that advertised that/recovery bios that I needed the feature for, and none of them have worked. Also even if the features does work, it’s a one-shot safety net; what are you going to do, abort your plan to update? If you did everything right the first time, you’ll just end up with two bad flashes, so you’re right back to nail-biting anxiety.
You’d think that a board would auto-revert from a failed flash, or - just spitballing here - make their fucking firmware for their fucking hardware not fucking fail spectacularly from basic testing and quality control. But I guess failed flashes drive sales so fuck fixing the problem, I guess.
Ugh. Actually angry about this, phones have had this issue solved for 15 years now but motherboards that have been around for like 50+ years, nah, too complex to fix. Sales go up ooga booga.
Wait, that is such a good point. Why aren’t motherboard firmware updates atomic?
Hmm, my motherboard (Asus) just has a reset button that flashes the contents of the secondary ROM to the primary ROM. If there’s any problem getting the primary to POST, you just push the button and it reflashes the primary from the secondary, so you’re back in the original state. It’s not a one-shot, because the contents of the secondary don’t change. You can use it as many times as you need to.
Once you get a good POST from the primary, it updates the secondary. I’ve never had an issue with this system.
Phone mainboards are very different, which is a big part of why maintaining third-party phone OSes is such difficult work, and why GrapheneOS constrains itself to specific devices.