TL;DR - reflashing the BIOS saved my old Desktop

This is a short tale from a corrupted BIOS in a MSI Tomahawk B350 Motherboard from 2017

On March 24th I used the computer to play some games and browse the internet as usual then gracefully shut it down. On the next day I tried to turn it on again, but the computer did not make it to POST verifications. No chance to get in the BIOS, no beeps or display at all. Nothing. The components were energized, all lit up on their leds, but nothing else.

Checked the MB debugging leds and I saw that they got stuck on “VGA” and did not get any further progress. So I tried to switch my current VGA with an old VGA card that I have. Same behaviour in the MB leds. Since I didn’t know if the old VGA was ok, I gave the MB diagnosis a credit.

As it is an 8 year old Desktop, maybe removing all attached cards/memory and cleaning up everything could help. Reattaching everything together can solve some problems, sometimes. However, I got the same MB leds behaviour.

Even trying to boot the PC up without any attached cards (only memory) lit only the same VGA led on the MB. Sigh… the MB debug led is wrong…

After a brief internet search I found similar problems with the same MB in the MSI forum where the problem was a corrupted BIOS chip. The problem in the forum was solved by reflashing the BIOS.

It all looks easy, however my MB does not have the external button to flash the BIOS (btw I discovered this was a thing looking for my problem in the forums).

So I had two ideas: Buy a new MB that supported my 8 year old setup OR try to reflash the BIOS with basic components for 1/6 of the new MB price.

After watching several bad and precarious videos in youtube about corrupted BIOS recovery (most of them in PT-BR my primary language (hue)) I bought a CH341a usb stick with an 1.8V adapter.

They come with a “double clip” that eliminates the need of removing the chip from the MB to read/write. And since I don’t have a hot air station to unsolder the chip, using the clip looked like a good plan.

The plan was to mount every component and, using the double clip, read from the chip, save it locally as some sort of backup (even though it was corrupted) and then write the most recent BIOS update of my MB to the chip. The most recent BIOS could be downloaded from the Support section of my MB page in MSI website.

When CH341a usb thing was finally delivered to my address I gave it a shot.

I mounted the CH341a and the 1.8V adapter in the correct pin orientation (regards to the bad youtube videos) and using the Linux app IMSProg I was able to find my chip specs and see a green “Connected” in the status bar of the app!

From here it all went as planned - I was able to read the old BIOS binary and save it locally to a file. Using xxd to compare the headers of the new BIOS with the extracted one I saw that they were nearly identical. This gave me hope!

I had to rename the new BIOS to a .bin extension so that the IMSProg could find it and open the file. After opening the file in the app I hit the automatic options: erase, program and verify. The process took a while but was finalized with a successful message.

After putting all Desktop pieces together the boot sequence completed and I was able to see the Windows login screen again :’-). Unfortunately my grub had gone away, but this is a tiny detail.

I Hope this text gives you courage and ideas to solve these awful problems that appear out of nowhere.