Updating Z68 to UEFI bios?

[sswilson]

This is a continuation of great_big_abyss 's RX5600XT thread, but I didn't want to take over his thread so I'm making a new one....

Essentially I need to update a Z68 board to a "beta" UEFI bios for video card compatibility and I'm a little bit leery of my options.

GA-Z68XP-UD4 (rev. 1.0) Support | Motherboard - GIGABYTE Canada

Lasting Quality from GIGABYTE.GIGABYTE Ultra Durable™ motherboards bring together a unique blend of features and technologies that offer users the absolute ...

www.gigabyte.com

That's the link for the board which includes this little nugget as a note for the bios upgrade....

UEFI BIOS
(When updating from legacy to UEFI, use only the utility attached to your BIOS file)

When you unpack the 7zip bios file you end up with flashefi.exe + and autoexec.bat which would load the .U1L bios file (presumably from within windows) as opposed to using the standard Q-Bios method to flash the bios from within the motherboard's configuration utility.

The snag is that this file is not compatible with windows 10 (16 bit only) and won't install from within windows so I'm looking for options....

Has anybody done something similar with success? I could try going the Q-Flash route, but I'm concerned that the UEFI update might not be compatible with the existing bios setup (I have the most recent prior to the beta bios). There's also apparently a 64bit version of the flashefi.exe file out there, but I have no idea if it would be compatible with the motherboard and/or bios file.

The other option is to create a dos boot usb stick and run it from there, but that takes us back to the bad old days of hoping your USB stick doesn't fail during the bios update.

Any suggestions?

 

[sswilson]

From what I'm reading on the 'net. It looks like the best option is to go the bootable usb route.

 

[sswilson]

The dirty deed is done....

Seems to have worked, but now we'll see about the OC and/or if win10 sees it as a hardware change.

edit: Yep... saw it as a hardware change as it went through a pretty lengthy setup on first boot, but all appears to be good (aside from needing to redo the OC and mem settings).

edit: I'd almost forgotten the nail biting "joy" of what is essentially an old school floppy drive bios update.

 

[djbrad]

And next time you install windows 10, it will be in uefi mode. It may boot faster?

I take out the usb floppy drive once a year to recover old data or flash bios on old computers.

I think that once you load the bios flash process, everything is in ram, so even if the floppy or flash drive dies, you are ok.

I just never update bios without having a know working ups on the computer. Power failure is worse in that case than the rest.

Congrats on you successfull update!

 

[sswilson]

And next time you install windows 10, it will be in uefi mode. It may boot faster?

I take out the usb floppy drive once a year to recover old data or flash bios on old computers.

I think that once you load the bios flash process, everything is in ram, so even if the floppy or flash drive dies, you are ok.

I just never update bios without having a know working ups on the computer. Power failure is worse in that case than the rest.

Congrats on you successfull update!

I ended up using Rufus to make a freedos boot USB and then just copied the files over to the root of that. Worked like a charm.

I did have to change the boot order, and selected "legacy only" for boot, but I'm planning on doing a full fresh install over the next week anyways.

 

[MARSTG]

maybe injecting some nvme drivers as well ?