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.

Written by Dave on 25 May 2008

Yay, that's very helpful,

Cafuego wrote:

Yay, that's very helpful, thanks :-)

Added Sun, 2008-05-25 17:51

Thank you very much! Just

Steffen wrote:

Thank you very much!

Just tried it with unzip before.

-> Very cool.

Added Sat, 2008-05-31 22:34

TNX

Anonymous wrote:

Thanks so much. It was very helpful.

Added Sun, 2008-06-15 04:07

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

Added Wed, 2008-07-16 22:49

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 :)

Added Wed, 2008-07-16 22:58

Thank you!

Riaz wrote:

That was a very helpful tip. Thanks!

Added Mon, 2008-09-08 10:30

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

Added Sat, 2008-11-22 16:28

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---Day-0%3A-BIOS.html

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!

Added Wed, 2008-12-31 09:13

I was chasing my tail trying

ashash wrote:

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,
chat film izle

Added Tue, 2009-04-28 23:39

Thanks a lot for this info.

ilahi 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---Day-0%3A-BIOS.html

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!

ilahi - ilahiler

Added Thu, 2009-06-04 01:43