Gigabyte Z77X-UD5H 'swap main and backup BIOS'

Nealio · 30 Dec 2019 at 22:35

Hi all,

Earlier today my PC was on while I was using a power tool that blew up and tripped the whole house out at the board. This evening when I came to switch the PC on again, it refused.

Long story short, main BIOS is goosed. I've got it back up and running on the backup BIOS and want to reflash the main BIOS back to functionality.

I've googled around and found lots of people mentioning various ways of forcing the board to automatically boot from backup and flash the main, but none of this works for me.

I've also seen mention of Alt+F10 at boot being flash backup from main and Ctrl+F10 being flash main from backup.

I've done Ctrl+F10 which brings up a screen that says 'swap main and backup'. It shows a progress bar 'reading main BIOS' then 'reading backup BIOS' then 'press enter to swap main and backup BIOS'

But it's not exactly clear what this is going to do. At the moment I have a working PC on the backup BIOS, I don't want to flash the knackered main BIOS to the backup or something and completely brick the board.

Can anyone confirm how this works?

I've also seen people suggesting to boot into backup BIOS, then flick the switch on the board back to main BIOS while it's turned on to enable me to flash the main BIOS but I'm extremely dubious about doing this...

wazza300 · 30 Dec 2019 at 23:33

I've also seen people suggesting to boot into backup BIOS, then flick the switch on the board back to main BIOS while it's turned on to enable me to flash the main BIOS but I'm extremely dubious about doing this...[/QUOTE]

This way works as far as I remember,you cant bork the board

bledd · 31 Dec 2019 at 11:12

For a feature that they shout about so much, it seems needlessly hard to use or find any information about.

Ideally you'd want a physical switch on the board and then the 'UPDATE Bios' screen to allow you to clone one to the other.

Nealio · 31 Dec 2019 at 12:11

bledd said:
For a feature that they shout about so much, it seems needlessly hard to use or find any information about.

Ideally you'd want a physical switch on the board and then the 'UPDATE Bios' screen to allow you to clone one to the other.

Well it's definitely a good feature; without it my board would be bricked right now. But yeah, it's hard to find any concrete authoritative information about how it works, what recovery functions there are, how they are accessed and what exactly they do.

But I do have a physical switch, I'm just hesitant to flick it with the machine turned on, it just intuitively feels like a bad idea.

Agree with you - ideally within the qflash utility there would be crystal clear functions built in to just 'copy main BIOS to backup BIOS' or vice versa.

wazza300 · 31 Dec 2019 at 14:15

You can flick the switch without issue and reflash the main bios

Msg stasio on here or tweaktown forum he will say the same thing

Ctrl and f10 should work aswell

Nealio · 31 Dec 2019 at 14:32

wazza300 said:
You can flick the switch without issue and reflash the main bios

Msg stasio on here or tweaktown forum he will say the same thing

Ctrl and f10 should work aswell

Yeah, I think I'm going to try the switch flick.

the Ctrl F10 thing seems to be 'swap main and backup BIOS' - ie flash the contents of the main BIOS onto the backup one and the contents of the backup BIOS on to the main one. Not really sure what use that would be to me - I'll end up (theoretically) still with only one working BIOS, it will just be the main one rather than the backup one. So I'd be doing two flashing ops with the risk inherent in that, for zero benefit, unless I'm missing something?

wazza300 · 31 Dec 2019 at 14:34

Im not 100% sure on the keypresses,there is a way to do it stasio knows

But I know the onboard switch will work without bricking the board

Nealio · 31 Dec 2019 at 17:34

Right, went with the BIOS hot switch option and reflashed... and it worked. Now both BIOS are functional again.

To be crystal clear for anyone else coming along with a similar issue, here's the steps I did.

1. Physical switch set to working BIOS (backup in my case)
2. Enter BIOS as normal.
3. Flick switch over to borked BIOS
4. Enter Qflash utility (I decided to do this after the switch in case qflash picks up a target BIOS at the time it's selected)
5. Flashed from USB

And so this old dog soldiers on...

Thanks for the reassurance that it would be OK Wazza300