Using 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 :)
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