RSS FeedUsing Gigabyte BIOS Updates on Linux Boxes
Dealing with Gigabyte support can be a frustrating experience. They only offer support via their website. Once they reply to your enquiry which can take several days, you get a response telling you to visit their website to read the response, and you can reply. This process means it can take several weeks to get a clear and final answer.
In my case I was trying to get a fix for what I thought was a flakey BIOS in my Gigabyte GA-M68SM-S2L. Although Gigabyte claim that their QFlash BIOSes can be loaded independently of the OS the box is running, they only supply them as Windows binary self extracting archives. Gigabyte tech support aren't much help, suggesting that users can just extract it on a Windows box. There is an alternative.
The Gigabyte QFlash binaries are simply self extracting rar files. The following steps make it easy to update Gigabyte QFlash BIOSes on a linux box (albeit with non free software).
- Download the firmware from Gigabyte
- cd /path/to/gigabyte-fw.exe
- unrar e gigabyte-fw.exe
- cp firmware.fw /path/to/usbstick
- Reboot computer and select flash BIOS from USB
If all goes to plan you should now have a new BIOS and not had to use a Windows machine to do it.
Yay, that's very helpful,
Cafuego wrote:Yay, that's very helpful, thanks :-)
Thank you very much! Just
Steffen wrote:Thank you very much!
Just tried it with unzip before.
-> Very cool.
TNX
Anonymous wrote:Thanks so much. It was very helpful.
Using Gigabyte BIOS updates on Linux boxes
Luther Woodrum wrote:I got to after the unrar e ...
Then I am to copy ...fw to the usb stick.
There are 3 files here, ma79xds5.f6, autoexec.bat, and FLASH895.EXE.
Which of these do I copy?
Thanks,
Luther Woodrum
RE: Using Gigabyte BIOS updates on Linux boxes
Dave wrote:The firmwares are named like so: [board-model].[rev]. I am assuming that you are wanting to upgrade your MA-790X-DS5 board to the revision 6 firmware, so you want the ma79xds5.f6 file :)
Thank you!
Riaz wrote:That was a very helpful tip. Thanks!
THX!
Rob wrote:Thanks for posting this.
I was chasing my tail trying to find a simple bios file on Gigabyte's site as opposed to the ubiquitous ".exe" file, which doesn't run on Linux and I wouldn't attempt it in Wine (too much patching and Ram swapping to trust it).
Off to Q-flashing or it's RMA for this thing.
Cheers,
Rob
Thanks a lot for this info.
Kevin Dean wrote:Thanks a lot for this info. I'm doing a little experiment by running Windows Server 2008 for a week and blogging about it on my site.
http://monochromementality.com/index.php/blog/show/The-Windows-Seat---Da...
Unfortunatly, it refused to install citing an out of date BIOS. Luckily, you wrote this tutorial, so I was able to flash it!
Thanks again!
unrar did not work with motherboard_bios_*.exe but wine do
jrose wrote:'unrar e motherboard_bios_ga-x48-dq6_f8d.exe' fails for me with:
root@moose:/root/BIOS_ga-x48-dq6(69)# unrar e motherboard_bios_ga-x48-dq6_f8d.exe
unrar 0.0.1 Copyright (C) 2004 Ben Asselstine, Jeroen Dekkers
Extracting from /root/BIOS_ga-x48-dq6/motherboard_bios_ga-x48-dq6_f8d.exe
unknown archive type, only plain RAR 2.0 supported(normal and solid archives), SFX and Volumes are NOT supported!
All OK
But 'wine motherboard_bios_ga-x48-dq6_f8d.exe' was succesful:
root@moose:/root/BIOS_ga-x48-dq6(70)# wine motherboard_bios_ga-x48-dq6_f8d.exe
wine: created the configuration directory '/root/.wine'
fixme:system:SetProcessDPIAware stub!
fixme:dwmapi:DwmIsCompositionEnabled 0x33cf34
fixme:file:MoveFileWithProgressW MOVEFILE_WRITE_THROUGH unimplemented
fixme:advapi:SetNamedSecurityInfoW L"C:\\windows\\system32\\gecko\\1.0.0\\wine_gecko\\components\\xpti.dat" 1 536870916 (nil) (nil) 0x21582c (nil)
fixme:iphlpapi:NotifyAddrChange (Handle 0xa71e8d8, overlapped 0xa71e8e0): stub
fixme:iphlpapi:GetAdaptersAddresses no support for IPv6 addresses
fixme:file:MoveFileWithProgressW MOVEFILE_WRITE_THROUGH unimplemented
fixme:advapi:SetNamedSecurityInfoW L"C:\\windows\\system32\\gecko\\1.0.0\\wine_gecko\\components\\compreg.dat" 1 536870916 (nil) (nil) 0x1e06354 (nil)
fixme:shell:DllCanUnloadNow stub
wine: configuration in '/root/.wine' has been updated.
root@moose:/root/BIOS_ga-x48-dq6(71)# ll
total 1676
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 26351 Aug 28 2008 FLASHSPI.EXE*
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 19 Apr 28 2009 autoexec.bat
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 623541 Dec 18 13:21 motherboard_bios_ga-x48-dq6_f8d.exe
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1048576 Apr 24 2009 x48dq6.f8d
Thanks!
Nate wrote:Brilliant! Worked like a charm. THANK YOU!
Now they use 7zip
Anonymous wrote:Now their ridiculous auto-extracting .exes are made by 7zip, so you've got to install 7zip thingies:
$ 7za e motherboard_bios_ga-ex58-ud5_f10.exe.7z
7-Zip (A) 9.04 beta Copyright (c) 1999-2009 Igor Pavlov 2009-05-30
p7zip Version 9.04 (locale=en_US.UTF-8,Utf16=on,HugeFiles=on,8 CPUs)
Processing archive: motherboard_bios_ga-ex58-ud5_f10.exe.7z
Extracting autoexec.bat
Extracting EX58UD5.F10
Extracting FLASHSPI.EXE
Everything is Ok
Files: 3
Size: 1074947
Compressed: 791367
Thanks for the initial post, it put me in the right direction. :)
Great!
Aaron S wrote:Just what I was after - thanks!
Thanks for the tip about 7za
adamuu wrote:That was the last clue I needed.
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