The entertainment industry spends millions on fear engineering: rails, inversions, g-forces, seat belts and medical warnings at the entrance to attractions. And the cheapest way to accelerate a person’s pulse to the ceiling looks like a gray bar of Bios update progress by 12% and the inscription “do not turn off or reboot the system.”
It is on this contrast that the one that went viral on the Internet is built meme: above is a trolley with screaming people and the caption “fake adrenaline”, below is a BIOS firmware screen and “real adrenaline”.
The joke is as old as UEFI itself, but it works flawlessly, since everyone who has ever updated the BIOS remembers these three minutes of complete helplessness. By the way, in the photo above, not just anything, but ArieForce One, a wooden roller coaster from Rocky Mountain Construction in the Fun Spot America park near Atlanta, one of the most evil in the world, which only adds to the arrogance of the meme.
The fear is not made up, it’s just pretty outdated. The firmware overwrites the contents of the SPI flash chip on the board, and if the process is interrupted in the middle, there will be nothing to load: resetting the CMOS is useless here, because the settings and the firmware itself live in different places. Hence the classic of the genre, when after an unsuccessful update the board does not produce anything at all.
BIOS update turns Lenovo Legion Go into a brick and costs owners 237 euros
Modern hardware, however, is so covered in insurance that you still have to try hard to turn the board into a brick. What really saves:
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BIOS Flashback button (MSI, Gigabyte and others have their own name), flashing a chip from a flash drive without a processor, memory or video card at all
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Dual BIOS with a backup chip, from which the board will rise if the main one dies
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A proprietary utility directly in UEFI instead of updating from Windows or Linux, where anything can interfere with the process
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Uninterruptible power supply, because a blinking light remains the main killer of firmware
There is also a completely radical school of repair: unsolder the chip, upload the image from the manufacturer’s website with a programmer like CH341A and return the chip to its place. In practice, those who have flashed hundreds of boards look at the whole drama with condescension, and one former gaming PC builder bluntly said:
Thousands of machines, firmware on each one before shipping, not a single brick.
The roller coaster ends after ninety seconds and returns you to the same platform, and the BIOS progress bar honestly warns you that there is no return ticket.
