MSI B550 BIOS flashing issues

U

UrbanFuturistic

2[H]4U
Joined
Apr 7, 2000
Messages
3,795
I have to start this post off by setting things up. My setup was a Ryzen 7 3700X on an MSI MAG B550M Mortar motherboard, Powercolor RX 6700 XT. It was running fine, until yesterday morning, I noticed that the stock AMD Wraith Prism had given up the ghost. Luckily I had set the RGB's to show the CPU temp, instead of just color cycling like everything else. Well, I decided that was as good a time to do my planned upgrade to a Ryzen 7 5800X3D. Already had it and a Corsair H100i Elite on deck. So I set about doing that. It took me most of yesterday, and a good portion of this morning to install the CPU and cooler, not focusing on it, just doing a bit here and there.

So earlier today, I finally got it all ready to go, and remembered I should probably update the BIOS, as going from a 3700X to 5800X3D, likely the board did not ship with the proper BIOS, and I haven't updated it in a bit, either. I get out a thumb drive, nuke it of all it's contents, and place the BIOS on there that I need, renamed to MSI.ROM. I'm going for the flash BIOS button method.

I plug in the USB stick, hit the button, and wait. The red light is flashing but in and on...off...on...off constant sort of fashion. I had assumed this would be like Supermicro boards that turn off and the light would blink super fast the whole time. So I let it sit for a while, and it just kept going. I know the Supermicro boards take a while, so I gave it like 15 minutes before I started googling. As I thought, after watching a video, the light should have blinked similarly to the Supermicro boards that I am familiar with. So I saw others having difficulty, including similar to mine and determined it was safe to unplug it, and did. Others say to use a smaller, older USB stick, or to limit the size of the USB stick and FAT32/MBR it, and it should work. I figured I would get to that eventually, but I wanted to try something else first...

So I decided next to give it the old let's see what happens when we try the old fashioned way. I plugged everything in and powered on the PC. Everything fires up, but I get the beep codes for video card error, 1 long, two short. Okay, great. I re-seated the card, and the card power, checked the slot, etc. Same result. Then I tried an RX 5600 XT, a GTX 1650, and a GT 730. All give me the error.

After all that, I decided to go back to the 3700X and see what I could make happen with a smaller USB stick formatted correctly. This time, I believe the flashback button worked, as it started flashing, but the PC also started up, and then after a few minutes, it rebooted. It still came with the same video card error.

Now, I am completely stumped, and I don't know what to do. I have no idea if I bricked my board or not, but I feel like it seems likely.
 
UrbanFuturistic said:
I get out a thumb drive, nuke it of all it's contents, and place the BIOS on there that I need, renamed to MSI.ROM. I'm going for the flash BIOS button method.
Click to expand...
My two cents... You should only do this when you can't POST already. Like you're doing a new build and the shipped BIOS doesn't work. Since you had it working fine with a 3700X, you could've done the normal flash procedure.

BIOS flashback is kinda iffy. I would make sure to try it again, but this time use a 16GB or smaller flash drive, make sure it's formatted to FAT32, and make sure MSI.ROM is the only file on there. The red LED on the BIOS flashback should flash for a while, once it finishes you can try to POST normally. If it only blinks for a few seconds, something is likely wrong with the flash drive. EXFAT won't work and for some reason I've had issues with larger drives (even if still FAT) attempting the "BIOS flashback" methods.

Also try it with nothing connected to the board except the 24pin ATX and 8PIN CPU. You don't need a CPU, RAM or VGA installed to do BIOS flashback.

Last quick edit: sometimes Windows formatting the drive is sketchy. Use Rufus to format it. There is a large discussion on Reddit about getting flashback working: https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/cakh3a/bios_flashback_tips_for_msi_mobo_owners/
 
I have the mother board which came out in June 2020 and started life with a Ryzen 3 3100, as when the new 5600x came out, I downloaded the new bios to a 2.0 usb flash drive and used Qflash in the bios to update on a working system with my 3100 still in it, once you have booted back to windows and everything is fine with the new bios in your case (5800 X3D bios) then shut down and pull the 3700x and put your 5800 X3D in, it should boot right up and run fine!

I would have never used your way of updating the bios just to switch to a 5800 X3D cpu.

Just did a bios update last night on the B550 Mortar board using Qflash and I am all patched up for hacking.
 
crazycrave said:
I have the mother board which came out in June 2020 and started life with a Ryzen 3 3100, as when the new 5600x came out, I downloaded the new bios to a 2.0 usb flash drive and used Qflash in the bios to update on a working system with my 3100 still in it, once you have booted back to windows and everything is fine with the new bios in your case (5800 X3D bios) then shut down and pull the 3700x and put your 5800 X3D in, it should boot right up and run fine!

I would have never used your way of updating the bios just to switch to a 5800 X3D cpu.

Just did a bios update last night on the B550 Mortar board using Qflash and I am all patched up for hacking.
Click to expand...
https://valid.x86.fr/5gcxti

You can see my board and bios, I was testing how much faster the 5600x is with 4 dims at those speeds vs 2 dims at default settings, if I turn on XMP1 3600Mhz Cl 14 timings the cpu slows down at default.
 
crazycrave said:
https://valid.x86.fr/5gcxti

You can see my board and bios, I was testing how much faster the 5600x is with 4 dims at those speeds vs 2 dims at default settings, if I turn on XMP1 3600Mhz Cl 14 timings the cpu slows down at default.
Click to expand...
Just curious, why the bus speed is 99.08 MHz instead of 100 MHz? Not much loss in performance, about 1% which probably makes no difference in real world application.
 
pututu said:
Just curious, why the bus speed is 99.08 MHz instead of 100 MHz? Not much loss in performance, about 1% which probably makes no difference in real world application.
Click to expand...
The board has always ran at that bus speed by default at 99Mhz unless I change it.
 
crazycrave said:
I have the mother board which came out in June 2020 and started life with a Ryzen 3 3100, as when the new 5600x came out, I downloaded the new bios to a 2.0 usb flash drive and used Qflash in the bios to update on a working system with my 3100 still in it, once you have booted back to windows and everything is fine with the new bios in your case (5800 X3D bios) then shut down and pull the 3700x and put your 5800 X3D in, it should boot right up and run fine!

I would have never used your way of updating the bios just to switch to a 5800 X3D cpu.

Just did a bios update last night on the B550 Mortar board using Qflash and I am all patched up for hacking.
Click to expand...
I wouldn't have done it that way, either, but I got ahead of myself and didn't think about it. I just installed the CPU and the drivers were more of an afterthought. If I had it to do over, I'd have loaded up the drivers, shut it down, and then installed the CPU and the new cooler.
I'm 100% sure at this point the motherboard is borked. I just ordered an ASRock B550M Steel Legend, which is like the only board currently available that even comes close to comparing. People want outrageous money for these MSI Mag B550M Mortar boards. I hate it.
Oh well. Hopefully it's only the board and not all of my components. If that's the case, I'll just quit my current job (integrator), and buy a pre-built and go find something menial to do for a job.
 
Not sure if applicable but... as for my experience there needed to be a gradual BIOS update, meaning one then another, for it to work properly. Instructions were contained in each BIOS revision but not carried on or explained. In the past I would always go to the last rev. and update. For once I was glad I read first. Not saying that is your issue but did you comply?
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top