Power loss during BIOS update

Community Support
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1

Framework 13 AMD 7040 running Ubuntu 24 LTS.

My laptop lost power during a bios update and now will not boot and doesn’t even reach the bios screen. Same issue on both ac power and battery.

The status code flashed by the onboard LEDs is 13 green, 1 red, 8 green. This appears 57 seconds after power on.

I have moved the m.2 drive to another computer and it boots without issue so I don’t think it is an OS related problem.

I have also tried following this guide ( How to Reset the Mainboard in your Framework Laptop 13 - iFixit Repair Guide ) however it does not seem to have had any effect.

Any help here would be much appreciated.

2

Contact support. If your machine is out of warranty, you can pursue either mainboard replacement at cost, reflashing the firmware manually (with the appropriate programmer) or having somebody on the forum or at a repair shop do the same at moderate cost.

(If you’re in the St. Louis area of the US, I’d be happy to do it for a coffee ;P)

3

Is the method documented anywhere?

4

Yes, somebody documented their attempt here:

You can use a WSON 6x8 pogo jig as well. Make sure you use 1.8v with whatever programmer you use.

5

Why?

I don’t want to just assume this was a lack of sanity in the user.

6

Surprisingly this happens more often than people realize.

Some vendors would not update the BIOS on laptops with less than 30%-50% charge for this very reason.

Since Framework boards can be standalone a different logic would have to be in place to put this additional protection in or at the least warn the user they are about to perform a BIOS update and the battery is either not present at all (standalone) or below X state of charge.

Further complicating things is requiring user input when there are cases the BIOS update needs to happen by just the UEFI shell automatically when trying to recover from a bad flash.

It would be nice to have a primary and backup BIOS like some motherboards have; this adds cost and complexity though.

7

Indeed.

Exactly why I was asking.

Attempting to update without a battery connected is no worse than updating a desktop, power cuts happen.

So the circumstances are what interests me, as user error can be avoided with brain power, mechanical issues are harder.

8

To prevent this I suggest using a 60W+ powerbank capable of input and output power at the same time. Be careful though, some powerbanks claim of doing so may reset to 5V upon plugging in the second input. Make sure to test them before powering a BIOS update

9

Right, that is what I was thinking. Except the OP stated it as a laptop so it definitely has a working battery to function as a laptop. My estimation is the battery was low or critically low, the power went out and…crickets

Too bad the EC couldn’t be talked to over the diagnostic port and have it automatically try to flash the BIOS if it was started up (like the power button is pressed and held for 10 seconds upon power up) to trigger looking for a USB device on a specific port and then reading and flashing the BIOS like what can be done on some Asus motherboards. I think they call that feature “flashback”. It is on a specific port on the back of the motherboard and I think a button has to be pressed and held or something to trigger it.

I had to do that a few years ago when 14th gen Intel processors came out but motherboards did not know how to talk to the newer gen processor and if you were building a new machine you probably didn’t necessarily have a 12th gen processor to just slap in it just to update the BIOS to be able to boot the 14th gen Intel processor freshly purchased.