[Discuss] Risks of BIOS (actually UEFI) updates

[Peter Willis]

Why not just back up your data and not worry about detecting old drives?
Do a fresh install of Debian on your newly updated bios system.

It may seem like a lot of work, but you’ve now gone 6 months with a failing system anyway.

What, exactly, is your hardware configuration? Include the case, PSU, and cooling.
What you’re describing could be any number of issues external to Ryzen or bios.

Top candidates:

-Bad noisy power supply
-Cheap or mismatched RAM in system
-Failing HD on power side (recently had one SSD burst into flames by itself at work. User complained of smoke)
-solder whiskers or cold flow on MoBo (Defective MoBo components or assembly)
-brass standoffs holding MoBo where plastic ones should be used
-Your household wiring has ground noise problems
-Bad network device is acting as noisy current sink on CAT5
-USB current sink issues from cheap USB devices
-Bad power bar creating noise
-Bad monitor acting as current sink
-Overheating of CPU or other components due to mal-designed case airflow or defective coolant flow
-LED indicator leads plugged into MoBo with incorrect polarity
-Ribbon cabled Floppy Disk Drives on modern MoBo (in General, get one that’s USB or SATA instead)
-Your Ryzen was previously RMA’d due to overheat and resold again by your vendor
-Your RAM needs cooling
-You have an old ATI video card running generic or custom kernel build driver that is mismatched (try a different brand)
-Believing in Overclocking and actually using it




> On Nov 11, 2018, at 12:01 AM, Alan W. Irwin <Alan.W.Irwin1234 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> On 2018-11-10 23:32-0500 Daniel AJ Sokolov wrote:
> 
>> A problem I have heard of is that a BIOS update somehow ruins GRUB or
>> something like that.
>> 
>> The machine will start, but it won't recognize your encrypted hard drive
>> as a boot drive. I'm unaware of a fix.
> 
> I don't use encrypted hard drives.  But just in case there are other
> inconsistency troubles with an updated UEFI, it appears
> <https://askubuntu.com/questions/831216/how-can-i-reinstall-grub-to-the-efi-partition>
> is a pretty good reference for how to make grub consistent with your
> UEFI.
> 
> Alan