Well that was interesting …
So I decided to upgrade the firmware on my ASRock TRX50 WS motherboard tonight. Partially because I had planned on trying it to sort out a mysterious crashing problem (which turned out to be the world’s worst SATA SSD ‘error’), and partially because I’d like to make sure I know how the process works. And funnily enough, finding ASRock’s instructions aren’t so simple.
The first really rather obvious step is to download the firmware from the ASRock support site. This comes down as a ZIP file, which needs to be unpacked :-
- TRX50-WS_9.03.ROM
This needs to be copied to a USB stick formatted as FAT32, but whilst you’re checking that make sure that the partition type is set to an appropriate value (0x0b is the value I used; the second time), because it turns out that the ASRock firmware won’t recognise a FAT32 filesystem just based on the actual filesystem – it checks the partition types.
But before you shut down and start the upgrade process, record any firmware settings you may have made … for better or worse, the upgrade will reset any changes you have made.
Starting the upgrade is fairly simple – go into Setup, move across to Tools and select the “Instant Flash” option. This will pop up a menu of different firmware version files it has found that are compatible with your motherboard. Select the version you want (in my case it was just one option), and press Return.
After a warning, it’ll start the upgrade process; this consists of :-
- A progress bar which slowly progresses to 100%
- A reboot which takes you back into the firmware.
- A second progress bar which also progresses slowly.
- At some point when this has finished, it’ll just sit there for a few minutes and finally start booting with the new firmware.
Of course in my case, the settings reverting to default values resulted in the SlimSAS controllers both being reset to “NVME” rather than “SATA” meaning half my storage array wasn’t present! But it all worked in the end :-
✓ root@pica» dmidecode -s bios-version
9.03Of course ASRock claim you only do a “BIOS Upgrade” (I hate that word “BIOS” – it’s not really appropriate) when it is absolutely necessary, but an upgrade when it isn’t necessary isn’t a bad idea. Just to get practice.
It should be noted that the firmware should be update-able with fwupdmgr so any urgent updates may well come via that route.
