Flashing a Gigabyte BIOS should be easier than this

This post is just here so Google can find it and hopefully save some other poor soul some time.

And lo, there is much sadness in the land of the Hackintosh, as my machine with a Gigabyte H87n-WiFi board has an unfortunate tendency to keel over every few weeks: Hard lock, nothing in the logs, just instant death. So I’ve been looking around for what to do to get this otherwise excellent rig to stop having seizures. And sigh there’s a lot of magical thinking in Hackintosh land. But going back to first principles it makes sense to update the BIOS to see if Gigabyte fixed some bugs. Can’t be too hard, right? It’s just a BIOS update, right? Like we’ve been doing for effing decades, right?

Well, gather round, children while uncle Nic tells you a sad tale.

Turns out Gigabyte have finally realized that not everybody who buys their boards are running Windows (thank you!) so you no longer have to download a weird Windows app to update the motherboard. Which, when you think about it, was insane. But those dark days are behind us now: Newer GigaByte boards have a Q-Flash utility right on the BIOS. You download the updater, put it on a FAT-formatted USB stick and boom!

Except you’ll get a “File size incorrect!” error.

Urgh.

So let’s Google that. And get a lot of noise about how the BIOS file got too big so you have to use a Windows utility called @Bios to update the BIOS to make it understand the BIOS is larger now.

Say it with me, kids: “Sigh.”

This turns out to be incorrect. The BIOS file you download from Gigabyte is a zip file and you have to decompress it, then put the actual update file on the USB stick and you’ll be golden. Hint: The actual flash file is the one that doesn’t end in .exe or .bat.

At this point you may be asking yourself things like, “Couldn’t Gigabyte just have put this information in the Readme file?” or “Shouldn’t people not post shit on the Internet where they’re just guessing?”

Those are valid questions, indeed.

But for now, go forth and update ye olde BIOS firmware and put thine thumbs together to hope it fixes thine problem.

In the meantime I’ll be over here shaking my head.