So how do we know if we need to update our firmware?
Let's ask Wes at the bench.
He Wes, I have a question du jour for you.
All right, how do we identify procedures for updating firmware?
I mean, how do we know it needs to be updated?
Are there any symptoms?
No, none.
Okay, thank you.
We're going to go now.
A very short episode, right?
Probably not what you were thinking.
Now, when it comes to a lot of the things
that we talk about through this series,
they do so manifest and sometimes some type of symptom.
But BIOS being out of date really doesn't manifest itself anyway.
It's just one of those things that as maybe a technician
or maybe it could be a home user
that we kind of got to just absorb it, take it under our wing
and just know that it's something that we have to do.
Well, what about causality?
I mean, is there something that we can check to see
if it's outdated or it needs to be updated?
Well, there's a couple of things.
Let's touch on the first point there.
You said it cause.
Really with the cause,
this really isn't anything anybody's doing wrong,
it's not anything that the manufacturer is doing,
and certainly not the end-users' fault by any means.
It just means that you've got a motherboard,
as time progresses, vendors find things that they have,
functionality flaws, maybe even adding additional features
that they want to do it.
And they don't go to every single person
when they make 100,000 in these motherboards,
they don't go to every single person and update it themselves.
It's just something that we have to assume responsibility for.
So, when we talk about cause, it could be the fact
that the motherboard that you buy
could be on the shelf for a while.
If you buy your computer from any place that sells computers,
it could be on their display floor or in a box,
you know, back in their warehouse for a while.
And as time goes, as fast as computing really does move,
the technology-wise, you just get behind the times.
That's all.
So, nothing really big on that.
Cause just means that, hey, as computers progress,
a lot of times that they're going to have these updates
to the firmware platforms.
So where do we go then to find out
if it does need to be updated?
Well, that's a great great question there, Zack.
There's a couple of different places that we can go.
You can put right into your BIOS,
just pushing a certain keyboard shortcut.
Pay attention to your vendor's instructions
and how to do that because it can vary slightly between
different vendors, or you can go into the operating system.
I like to go into the operating system
because if I have to do a BIOS,
if I think I have to do a BIOS upgrade,
then I can check with the firmware is,
I have the web browser right there,
I can go to the vendor's website, verify it,
if I need to, download it, format a thumb drive
where we put these files and just reboot.
So, I like to start in the operating system.
Well, can you give us an example of how that looks?
Sure. Let's take a look here.
So we're in our Windows 10 machine here,
and there's a couple of different places that you can do this.
One of the main places I like to go is to a little utility called MS Info.
You'll see that it's a system information application,
it comes up here.
And if we launch this,
there's a couple of things that we're looking for.
One of the things I'm looking for,
two of the things honestly, I'm looking for is the system model,
the name of the motherboard,
and then what the current firmware
is because I need the vendor,
and I kind of need this information.
I know it's a little hard to see.
So what we're going to do?
What do you say we make it a little easier,
especially for somebody like me who has glasses.
I'm going to open a notepad, show you a cool little trick here.
I'm going to go ahead
and I'm going to copy the system manufacturer
because I have to know, well, who is it that makes it?
- And we'll just kind of paste this into our notepad there. - Oh, very good.
So you can see it a little bit easier.
It makes it a little easier to see.
And then what I want is, I want this line
because that's the motherboard itself, all right,
because I have to go to the manufacturer's website
and I'll just paste that.
I could see it's a Z390 gaming export.
But then what's really super important in the end here
is this you notice it says BIOS and it says version and date.
And again, let's copy and paste this into something
that makes it a little bit easier to see.
So now we're kind of done a little bit
of our preliminary detective work, right?
We've got our Columbo hat on.
We got Gigabyte is the manufacturer,
the system model, the motherboard is Z390.
And then finally, American Megatrends or AMI;
this is the version of the BIOS here.
And I can see that the version here is F8,
which right now at this point means absolutely nothing to me
because the version numbers
are going to be their naming convention.
You don't know what version it is.
Yeah. And then the other thing that we could see right here
is the fact that we also have our date
and you can see that this date
is actually we're in August 2020.
You can see this date is about a year old.
You might be maybe a version or two behind me.
Yeah, that's a good observation.
Yeah, given the fact that it's been about a year
since we're seeing this version here,
my guess is that there's probably at least one,
maybe be more, but at least one version
that we need to kind of upgrade on to.
So, the next thing that we're going to do
is we're going to take this information.
We can close the system information tool down.
I'm going to leave this notepad up
and what we'll do is we'll fire up our web browser
and we're going to go to Gigabyte's website.
And again, because that's the manufacturer.
And we're going to look for inside of their inventory,
if you will, we're going to look for our Z390 gaming export.
And do pay attention
because there are minor revisions of these boards,
which essentially is a different hardware platform.
And this one is revision one.
I know this because I built this computer, all right.
And what we want is the support page.
Now the support page,
you'll see that it defaults to what the operating system
is that we're using and we're using Windows 10 64bit.
And then these are the various drivers
that you might need to update,
but the driver specifically that we want
- is really the firmware platform and you can see BIOS here. - BIOS, right.
And if I expand that out, you remember
that if we compare this information now
that it said that we have F8 and it's showed that date,
we can kind of see here if I get this out of the way
that F8 is right there,
and I can at least see that there's an F9,
but scrolling up, I can see that there's also an F10.
So are two versions behind.
We're two versions behind.
So what we need to do
is we need to just click the download option here.
And I'm going to go ahead
and what I'll do is I'm going to save this.
You could save it to your downloads folder.
I like to just know where my downloads are going.
I lose my head if it wasn't attached,
so I'm going to save it right to the desktop,
just to make it easier for our viewers to see.
And then at this point here,
I'm going to close down our web browser
and we've got the firmware that we need.
And in fact, I'll go ahead and close down our notepad here
and we'll just go ahead
and we don't need to save any of that.
And then at this point, what we're going to do
is we're going to right-click
and we're going to extract this folder, all the files, I'm sure.
I assume there's another directory here.
Yeah.
And here are the files that we need to make sure
that we can flash this firmware platform.
Now, the next thing that we have to do, Zack,
is we have a USB device that is in here
and you can see it's right here.
And what we need to do
is we need to prepare this USB device
in order to put the BIOS firmware, new firmware on it.
Do we have to use the USB to put the BIOS?
Yes. You want to use a USB thumb drive,
plug it into anywhere on the PC.
That's typically the way that you do it
and then you reboot the computer
and provided you have it formatted right,
the BIOS should recognize it.
Let me show you something here that I've run into before this.
If you look, if I go to format this particular USB device,
you're going to see that the capacity is 20GB.
It needs to be no bigger than a 2GB part,
or I should say, it can't be bigger…
your files themselves, they need to be a certain size.
If the drive is too large,
Windows won't give you the ability to format in FAT32.
And specifically, that's because FAT32… you want FAT32
because of the fact that it is recognized typically
by all of your vendors out there
because it's been around for a long time,
it's been around since the 80s.
So that's why we want to make sure that it's FAT32.
So, if you needed to do that,
the easy way to do this is Disk Management.
We could go up to Disk Management here.
And originally, if I just go ahead and delete this volume here.
Let me show you what I mean.
And so notice that this is a 60GB thumb drive, right?
FAT32 is not going to work that well.
And if I just do a new simple volume here
and I start clicking next through this wizard,
giving it a volume label, and if I look at the down option,
notice, it says NTFS and exFAT.
Yes.
And that's because of the limitations of FAT32.
So before I do this, what I need to do
is I need to kind of go back to the beginning of the drive here,
and rather than just doing a simple volume
and letting Windows format the entire drive,
I'm going to reduce the size of this drive a little bit
and hopefully give us the ability to see FAT32
to come up in the list,
I'm going to format it down to about 20GB,
so a third of the size of what this drive actually is.
I don't care what the drive letter is, that's perfectly fine.
And now if I hit the drop-down list,
you'll see FAT32 is in the list and again,
it's just because I couldn't use the entire volume
and I'm going to call this Firmware.
And the reason I'm doing that is
because sometimes when you get into your BIOS,
it'll just recognize a crazy string that you don't know.
You can't really identify if it's a hard drive or not.
This lets me know that when I look in the BIOS,
if I see something called Firmware,
then that's going to be the drive I'm looking for.
And in convention you can understand and remember.
Exactly.
And it's really for identification purposes.
I could call it paper, rock, scissors if it fits
and it doesn't matter,
but it really probably wouldn't do me too much.
So we'll go ahead.
And if we look here, we'll just choose finish.
It's going to format that drive in FAT32.
You'll see that Windows is telling us
we've got a new drive here.
It is formatted and what we're going to do
is just take this little folder that we extracted
and we're going to go ahead
and we're going to just put this right there
on that thumb drive.
And now we're really ready to go ahead and restart this machine.
And when we restart the machine,
we'll get into the BIOS interface.
And keep in mind when you restart your machine,
you're just pushing a certain keyboard combination
when you see the splash screen
and that'll take you into your BIOS
where you can do the flashing of the firmware.
So can you take us through that?
Absolutely.
Let's check it out.
So we've restarted, Zack, here,
and what we've done is I've hit that F12 key
for this vendor again.
Pay attention to whatever the vendor is
to get into this screen here.
And kind of a side note, you'll notice
that it says Patriot Memory here, Partition 1.
I kind of know that, you might not recognize it right away,
but that's our actual thumb drive that we put in there.
And we're going to go ahead and choose enter set up.
And what that's going to do
is that's going to take us into our BIOS interface.
And again, pay attention to the settings
that come along with the motherboard
in the instruction manual in order to do this.
What we're looking for is actually Q-Flash.
So what we're going to do is we're going to select Q-Flash
and you'll notice that we've got,
well, two different options here.
So we have Update BIOS, but we also have Save BIOS.
Now, what I'm going to do before I make any modifications,
and by the way too, as a side note,
remember that I told you you could see in BIOS
what the version of the date was.
That's the same information
that's being reported to the operating system.
What I'm going to do first,
though, is I'm actually going to save the BIOS.
That's like a backup. It is.
You want to make sure that you back up those settings
just in case something goes wrong.
If the flashing process, if you will, fails,
you can then restore from the earlier settings.
And with the flashing process, what is that exactly?
That is just really what they call writing
to the ROM chip that's on the motherboard,
The BIOS ROM chip or UEFI ROM chip.
So let's take a look here.
What I'm going to do is I'm going to select this part,
this drive here.
Notice that it says we've already got…
there's that BIOS that we need to use.
But I'm going to go ahead
and I'll just call this Backup BIOS,
and we'll just from there, we'll just go ahead
and choose the right arrow in this case.
And what it's going to do
is it's going to write those instructions
that are currently in the BIOS to that thumb drive.
See, that's fast.
Yeah, it doesn't take long.
And we'll just go ahead and escape out of this,
go back to Q-Flash, and now at this point,
what we're going to do is we're going to update the BIOS.
So we'll select update bios and I have to select the folder.
And when you select the folder, again,
this is why it's important to remember
what the folder name was.
And then you can see this Z390GX.10c.
That 10c is telling us what the same version
that we've seen on the vendor's website.
We're going to go ahead and choose that.
And then what we're going to do
is choose to what do we want to do?
Do we want to do an intact or do we want to do a fast update?
In this case, I'm going to go ahead
and I'm going to do the intact update.
Now, this could take a while.
This might actually not be too long,
but what we can see here is now
what's happening is it's overwriting the instruction set
that was prior to the one that we backed up.
So essentially what it's doing
is it's overriding the old BIOS ROM instructions
or UEFI ROM instructions with the new instructions.
And if anything should go wrong,
it'll let us know that it'll reverse that process,
it'll back out, and then at that point,
what I'd want to do is I'd want to reflash the ROM again,
write those instructions via this interface
for the old settings and then start the process again.
Now, I know what you would write to the 10
and skipping the 90s, you don’t need the 90s.
I don't need it.
You need the most current version.
I'm glad you mentioned that.
Absolutely, because what happens is,
when they make those changes,
they usually roll up the last changes into the new version.
So essentially eight was in nine
and then nine was rolled up into 10.
So we should have all of that functionality ready to go
and even correcting any of the functionality
that maybe nine didn't give us.
So you'll have that and then some.
So if we take a look here, we can kind of see the process
that it's going to want us to reboot the screen
or reboot the machine.
So Zack, what do you say?
What we'll do is we'll go ahead
we're going to reboot this machine
and when we get done reboot
and the machine will look into BIOS one more time.
Oh, good.
And then in fact, we can do it right here.
Let me go ahead, and let's show you here.
Rather than having to get into the operating system,
we could do this right from BIOS here in general.
And you'll see me hitting the F12 button rapidly.
You don't have anything against that though.
No, I don't.
Notice it says the boot menu here,
that's going to take us back into that boot menu.
And look, the whole screen's color has changed.
And then when I said that it gives you improved functionality
sometimes, we choose to enter the setup now,
check out what it looks like now.
Look at the interface, how it's changed, right?
It has.
And we can see right here, Zack,
that we have the same motherboard, that didn't change.
The BIOS version is F10c, that's right,
and we've got an entirely new pretty BIOS interface,
I have to say here.
Now, one of the things I'll have to do right away
is I know is I notice it's in French.
- I don't speak French.
- I wish I could. - Oui, oui.
That's right.
So I'm going to change the default language here
to English, and then we could save our changes.
But there you go, Zack.
That, in a nutshell, is how you identify
that your BIOS is out of date,
where you can go to find that information,
how you can acquire the new firmware code,
and then finally, how are you going to play into your system.
Thank you, Wes.
I knew we could count on you.