I was updating a GA-73PVM-S2H motherboard BIOS. It should not be too hard you just download the file from the website put it on a USB sick, reboot to BIOS level and install using the Q-Flash Bios update process.
Only a couple of issues :
Firstly the BIOS does not recognize some USB keyboards even when you plug them into a USB/PS2 adapter. No keyboard, no chance to jump into the BIOS menu. There is a setting in the BIOS to enable USB keyboard but that does not help at this stage even when the operating system later recognizes the keyboard.
Secondly, Buried in the motherboard manual is the instruction "Extract the file and save the new BIOS file (e.g. 73PVS2H.f1) to your floppy disk, USB flash drive, or hard drive" The files you download have to be run, un-Rar extracted first on a PC. Not much use when the only other machines you have are are a MAC and Linux box. The symptom you see is the BIOS file browser will just not see any files on the USB stick which just so happen to look very like the file browser is not working at all.
You can get a bit of a clue is given using file
$ file motherboard_bios_ga-73pvm-s2h_f4.exe gives
MS-DOS executable PE for MS Windows (GUI) Intel 80386 32-bit, RAR self-extracting archive
This is just plain awkward and certainly not a space saving exercise as the uncompressed file is 512k and the archive only 504k. There should be a link to an uncompressed version of the file.
Thirdly : Also the BIOS when it is being installed it gives a checksum but the website does not say anywhere what the checksum is so you don't know if the checksum is right or wrong.
A simple service operation made awkward by neglect of the small details that matter.
Another i-aarrgh moment brought to you by Gannett
