this post was submitted on 17 Feb 2024
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Just happened to me the other day at THE worst possible moment. I bought a new mainboard which needed a BIOS update to work with my new CPU.
Me of course being a cheapskate I bought the cheapest one with no Bios flashback. So I put the files on a cheap USB, start the upate and compleatly bricked the mainboard.
After that I plugged the USB back into my PC and the fking USB corrupted the files.
Luckily I managed to save the BIOS but absolutley lost it in that moment.
Value your time and sanity over pure monetary value. It seems like something Lemmy users seem to do the complete opposite of at all times.
Saving $1 on a flash drive could have cost $100 on a motherboard. Saving $20 could have cost you $100 buying another one.
Learned this lesson the hard way, once bought a cheap replacement laptop charger for one that had broken.
It didn't work and instead borked the backlight of my screen. I then discovered that on this model, the backlight couldn't be separately replaced, had to buy and fit a whole new screen and then also buy another replacement charger.
Never cheap out on things that hold data, or power supplies.
At best, you'll get extremely lucky and nothing untoward will happen.. giving you false confidence to try again.
At worst, catastrophic loss of data, hardware, or more.
The flashdrive in case was a random merchandise gift thing. It worked previously and was just the first one in the drawer.
But yeah in the future I will defintly get something better.
Also I did learn how to directly read and write Chips on the mainboard so the time spent wasn't totally wasted.
Oof. Honestly I do the same thing and I think your experience just convinced me not to. I keep a couple of those junk vendor USB's just for things like BIOS updates since the capacity is usually small. I hadn't considered one failing right in the middle of an update.
That's fucking rough! Crappily produced electronics are a plague.