24-hour BIOS update? User's attempt to flash motherboard becomes a marathon

Redditor u/GoatWithAGun updated the BIOS of an old PC packing a BioStar A320MH motherboard, and 24 hours later, the update process is only about 66% done. The Reddit user is updating the subreddit r/pcmasterrace on the process, and a lot of users are now following the progress through multiple posts.

According to u/GoatWithAGun, the computer in question is used as a backup device and is often just used by their roommates for printing. Nevertheless, they still updated the motherboard because it offered stability fixes.

The computer in question is a machine with parts from around 2018. Aside from the BioStar A320MH rev 6.0 motherboard, the redditor told Tom's Hardware that the PC also has an AMD Ryzen 3 1200 CPU, 4GB of DDR4-2400 Kingston HyperX memory, an Asus GTX 1660 GPU, a 128GB Transcend SATA SSD, and a 480GB Crucial SATA SSD. Despite being seven years old, it’s still quite usable, especially if you’re not using it for AAA gaming.

This isn’t the first time that u/GoatWithAGun installed a BIOS update, so the more than 24-hour process was a shock to them. At the time of writing, they left the PC updating its BIOS in their dorm — if it’s still installing by the time they get back tomorrow, they plan to set up a live stream so that other Redditors can join them in their pain.From 4 hours to 16 hours… from r/pcmasterrace

We do not know the reason why the BIOS update is taking so long, as the process usually takes a few minutes at most. The Redditor suspects that this happened because they installed the update directly from their SSD, but we cannot say that for sure.

Unfortunately, you cannot cancel this update as interrupting it will only brick the system. As the BioStar A320MH is a pretty basic model, it doesn’t have dual BIOS or BIOS flashback, so u/GoatWithAGun does not have any other option except to let it finish. Furthermore, they also confirmed that the PC is not equipped with a UPS, so any kind of power interruption would mean that it is toast.past the 24-hour mark now… from r/pcmasterrace

Hopefully, we will see a post soon showing a successful BIOS update. But should it fail, u/GoatWithAGun could just hop on the used market and find a replacement as all their other components still work well. Nevertheless, we're cheering them and their motherboard on.