Bun­dled with Gi­ga­byte moth­er­boards is a small util­i­ty called “@BIOS”, which pur­ports to have the abil­i­ty to up­date the moth­er­board BIOS from with­in Win­dows, XP or Vis­ta. A lot of “ad­vanced” com­put­er users tend to be wary of such a propo­si­tion, but Toshiba lap­top BIOS­es ac­tu­al­ly do have this func­tion­al­i­ty and it works quite well.

Un­for­tu­nate­ly, Gi­ga­byte’s tool does not work as ex­pect­ed. I tried to up­date my BIOS from with­in Win­dows Vis­ta, with no other pro­grams run­ning, and the pro­gram crashed in the mid­dle of flash­ing the ROM. For­tu­nate­ly, I ex­pect­ed that my board would be dead, so I looked some stuff up on Google be­fore I re­boot­ed. Posts on some fo­rums told me that the BIOS would au­to-re­cov­er an im­age from the hard drive, so I down­load­ed Gi­ga­byte’s lat­est BIOS from their web­site and put it on the root of my drive. I was lucky; when I re­boot­ed, the BIOS found the im­age and was able to re­cov­er it­self.

Lesson learned? Avoid @BIOS like the plague.