Your PC lost power during a BIOS update because of a freak thunderstorm or a circuit breaker, or you just tripped over the power cord, and you've bricked it, meaning you now have a very expensive paperweight. Is there any way to resurrect it from the dead?
Well as with many things in life, the best way to deal with an issue is to stop it from happening in the first place. And other than the obvious step of connecting your PC to an uninterruptible power supply or UPS while the BIOS is updating or making sure the battery is full, if it's a laptop, the best thing you can do is buy a motherboard with some kind of BIOS backup or easy recovery option.
This can take the form of several different features. Some boards have a full-on dual BIOS setup, where if your primary BIOS gets corrupted, the secondary BIOS chip will automatically kick in when you try to start the PC and it will copy its contents back over to the primary BIOS. 
So you don't have very much downtime at all.
There are also some boards that require you to flip the physical toggle, to switch over to these secondary BIOS. Then, once you've started the system and entered your BIOS settings, you can flip the switch back over and then flash the corrupted chip.
Other boards will allow you to overwrite a corrupted BIOS with a good copy that stored on a USB stick without needing to physically adjust anything on the PCB itself. 
You might see this feature advertised under names like BIOS flashback or crash free BIOS. You just use a working PC to download the BIOS file from the manufacturer's website, copy it to the USB stick. Sometimes there's a bit of formatting kajigarie to make sure the file name's right. Then you plug the stick into the bricked PC.
To load the fresh BIOS, some mother boards have you press a dedicated button on the IO panel 
while others will simply detect and load it for you when you power the system on. Sometimes there's a specific port you gotta plug it into as well.
But let's say your motherboard doesn't have any kind of emergency fallback option. It used to be that some motherboards had replaceable BIOS chips that fit into a socket similar to CPUs, but this is no longer the case.
You could try sourcing your replacement BIOS chip from somewhere like eBay or an online retailer that specializes in selling them, but you would need to be pretty comfortable with a soldering iron.
And since modern BIOS chips are rather small, it could be quite a delicate operation, especially since you run the risk of damaging nearby components if you don't have steady hands.
Fortunately, there's another method you can try. It is actually possible to flash a bad BIOS chip by connecting a device directly to the little pins that hold it onto the motherboard. You'll need to pick up a little external BIOS programmer or flashing tool that looks like this 
with the CH341A being a popular model, and it'll cost you between 10 and $15.
Just make sure that the one that you buy includes one of these clamps, it kind of looks like a car jumper cable.
The basic idea is to connect one end of the cable to the flashing device itself, while the clamp goes directly onto your bad BIOS chip.
Just make sure the red part of the cable lines up with pin one, which is usually indicated on the chip with a little dot. 
From there, you can plug the flashing device into a working PC via USB and load up either the included flashing software or an application like, AsProgrammer. 
Make sure your broken motherboard is disconnected from power. Then use the software to write a good copy of the BIOS back to your corrupted chip.
This process can take some time and can involve some trial and error, but it is a heck of a lot better than dropping three figures on a brand-new motherboard.
No comments yet