Using Gigabyte BIOS Updates on Linux Boxes

Update 2013: Some comments suggest that Gigabyte are now using 7zip, not rar as their archive format.

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.