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Created March 4, 2013 19:23
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Updating Motherboard BIOS Checklist, or I Updated My Motherboard BIOS and it was Almost a Complete Catastrophe
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Having just gone through a BIOS update the hard way I'm putting this checklist down for future reference. Everything ended up fine but it the entire proceses was much harder than it needed to be. The big takeaway here: backup everything you cannot live without.

My setup is nothing particularly exotic, you can see the notes below for details about the hardware. I'm using an Ivy Bridge motherboard with UEFI BIOS. My boot drive is an SSD and I have three drives together in a RAID 5. I'm using Windows 8 Pro for my OS.

Here's the general checklist. It's not very specific as the details may vary based on your particular configuration. I'm also not an expert on this so YMMV.

  1. Get latest BIOS.
  2. If possible, back up your BIOS configuration. Just in case.
  3. Close all running applications.
  4. Apply BIOS update.
  5. Restart computer.
  6. BEFORE Windows boots enter the BIOS configuration. I cannot stress how important this is. I didn't do this and it was the source of my pain. When you update your BIOS your configuration gets set. In my case the primary boot drive was swapped and my RAID was disabled.
  7. Ensure boot device is set properly. Mine was changed.
  8. If you have a RAID ensure the SATA disk mode is set to RAID.
  9. Save changes and exit.

What happens if you don't do step six like I didn't? The computer will attempt to boot but error out since the boot drive is misconfigured. You'll enter the BIOS and set that up properly but then when Windows boots your RAID is gone! So you'll restart and enter BIOS setup again and turn on RAID, boot Windows ... and wait and wait and ... blue screen of death. So you bust out your iPad and start Googling. You find a bunch of forums but nothing quite exactly like your problem. There are also a lot of posts where the OP gets a lot of advice and posts back something like, "Thanks for all the help. Turns out it was something else." but never mentions what that something else was. You get a beer because, damn, this is getting frustrating.

Okay, well let's try booting Windows again since we're getting nowhere with Google. Oh! Okay, Windows realizes something is amiss and offers to restore your computer to a previous checkpoint. It does all of this and ... YES! Boots! But ... NO! RAID is still missing. Google. Google. Beer. Google. Swearing. Google. Eff it. Tinker. Tinker. Tinker. Success! Time to write this down, hopefully it can help some other poor soul.

Here's the steps that ultimately lead to a solution for me:

  1. Power off and restart your computer. That is: completely turn the computer off and then turn it back on, don't use the restart button.
  2. Enter the BIOS setup.
  3. Ensure BIOS is configured to use the proper boot drive.
  4. Turn on RAID in SATA disk settings.
  5. Save changes and exit.
  6. Let Windows attempt to boot. It will ultimately blue screen.
  7. Repeat 6 until Windows offers to restore from a previous checkpoint.
  8. Restore from a previous checkpoint.
  9. Windows will boot, your RAID will be there, you might have to reinstall some software (side effect of system restore).
  10. Grab a beer. You deserve it.

NOTES:

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