Troubleshooting dead dual BIOS motherboard

Many times people try to flash a new BIOS in their motherboard which fails and thus the motherboard seems to be dead. This mostly happens in the dual BIOS motherboard. Actually you can retrieve the dead motherboard back from the dead to get it working properly. I have a Gigabyte EP45-UD3P which when I tried to update BIOS with a new version failed. It was dead for a long time until I figured out a way to get it back to life. All you need is working BIOS files, small tweezers which can hold small wires, soldering machine. Actually the problem that I have described happened on my Gigabyte EP45-UD3P when I was updating BIOS and the installation failed in some block. I restarted the computer only to find that it is not detecting RAM.

At this point, my motherboard would fail to read the improperly installed BIOS in it and would try to recover the previous version of BIOS that is stored in the secondary BIOS chip. I had tried to disable the primary BIOS chip so that the motherboard would load BIOS from the secondary chip, but even this process failed to work on my Gigabyte EP45-UD3P. Actually, this processor has two BIOS chips on it. But making the secondary chip to act as primary chip is not possible. So I found a way around using which we can make the secondary BIOS chip to act as primary chip. We can solder the pin number 4 from secondary chip with the pin number 7 of the primary chip for the secondary chip to load the BIOS during startup. You need to connect the pins using a wire and create a button or some setting using which you can disable the connection.

After doing this once, the primary chip will detect the problem in itself and get data from the secondary chip to restore the working version of BIOS. To do this, when the PC starts, hold the connector or button you have created. The startup will take more time than usual and wait for the memory test and welcome screen to show up and proceed to main system. As soon as the welcome screen goes away, release the switch or connector for the wire. At this moment, the primary BIOS chip will detect that it can’t handle the working of the system and will recover the working BIOS from secondary chip.

I hope this helps you to get your dead motherboard working again as it should.

I think the usual QFlash method can be trusted more than this method. It is tried and tested method and we will find many posts and forums on internet which will discuss this solution. So I don’t think that I will ever test this way to get the BIOS from one chip to another for a dual BIOS motherboard. But I would like to test this method once, so if I ever get my hands on a old dual BIOS motherboard, then this is the first thing I would like to try out.