This guide serves mainly as a reminder for future me about what I do have to do and to consider when updating the BIOS of my MSI X670 Gaming Plus WiFi motherboard.

Do not consider this guide as an authorative source on how to do this properly, these notes are just personal experience.

Protip: Don’t do this when you’re in a rush or need your computer shortly after. I recommend performing this when you have at least one more day to fix stuff after you applied the update (to sleep and cure potential frustration).

General Notes and Prerequisites

All instructions refer to the Advanced Mode of the BIOS. It can be toggled by pressing F7 or clicking the button in the top center of the UI.

Booting into the BIOS happens by pressing Del during bootup. Other useful keys are CTRL-F5 to boot directly into M-Flash (see info below) and F11 to enter the boot menu.

Whenever something is changed in the BIOS, the next boot takes forever (a couple of minutes). During this time, the display is not active and it seems like the computer hangs. I’m not sure what causes this, probably some full hardware test or something similar which takes quite long due to the amount of RAM I have installed. Anyways, don’t worry, at some point it’ll boot.

If you need help, here are useful manufacturer links:

Perform the Update

First, you need a FAT/FAT32 formatted USB flash drive.

Download the respective version from the manufacturer website. Extract the ZIP file and place the contents (should only be two files) onto the flash drive. Sync and unmount.

Reboot the computer and enter the BIOS setup. Click M-Flash and confirm the dialog. The computer should now reboot into the M-Flash mode and you can select the BIOS image you placed on the flash drive. Navigate through the process and let the BIOS update itself.

When everything is updated, enter the BIOS again.

Fix Settings

The BIOS update resets all settings.

Note: It might be possible to save and restore these settings via the OC PROFILE menu, but I’ve not tried it and can’t be bothered right now. Might be worth a shot before doing the next update though.

For whatever reason, the BIOS also bricked systemd-boot, so first thing is to boot a live linux and and mount the system to work in it.

For me, this involves roughly sth like this:

cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/encrypted-root-partition root
mount /dev/mapper/root /mnt
mount /dev/efi-system-partition /mnt/efi
arch-chroot /mnt

Then, when in the system, a bootctl install fixes the bootloader.

After that, reboot into the BIOS and adjust a few settings.

First, disable Secure Boot and reboot into BIOS. Then, when dual-booting, fix the boot-order so that systemd-boot is before Windows Boot Manager.

Should need be, do the respective Secure Boot setup for linux again (installing keys, etc.).

Also, annoyingly, the fan curves need to be done again, which is probably the most upsetting of all lost configuration values.