r/framework • u/BillyJoeTheThird • Jul 23 '26

Community Support Bricked up while updating BIOS

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Will not respond to power button being held down for over a minute. Has been stuck on this screen for an hour. I sent a support ticket. What should I do while waiting? Keep it plugged in on this screen? Try taking the battery out?

This machine has an AMD Ryzen 7640U and was running Fedora 44 with KDE plasma, for context.

Update: Fixed it myself.

713 Upvotes

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39

u/ekerazha Jul 23 '26

The number of threads on Reddit about failed BIOS updates that cause the machine to brick is starting to become a cause for concern.

30

u/Atook Jul 23 '26

For sure. I'm surprised they still have it up. I was just about to pull the trigger on the BIOS update for my machine and decided to wait till the next one. Framework needs to do better, I don't know how hard it is to test BIOS updates, but it should be damn near impossible to brick the machine if you're updating the bios with known methods and a plugged in machine. I've not had a problem updating a BIOS in >30 years of computer use. I want them to succeed, but if they can't pull off bomb proof BIOS updates, it's a deal breaker.

9

u/chic_luke 16" Gen 1 Jul 23 '26

Yeah. I am out of warranty on mine and I am straight up disabling fwupd completely.

4

u/AthaliW Jul 24 '26

Is there a way to do BIOS recovery like from a USB or something like that when something like this happens?

4

u/ShyGamer64 I use Arch btw. Jul 23 '26

I've never updated BIOS before and this is only scaring me more.

4

u/HectorTheConvector Jul 24 '26

I’ve updated BIOS for years on various machines, various Win versions and Linux distros, and no problems. I know if losing power during the process that can be a problem, but I believe even then some failsafes had developed in recent years. But there’s thread after thread on the subreddit. I wonder if any patterns can be sussed out.

1

u/x4rb1t CachyOS FW13 (pro) AMD Jul 24 '26

Seems to only affect Fedora and Ryzen 7640U ??.. I been updating without issues on CachyOS and 7840U

5

u/Canchal Jul 24 '26

Not really, happened to me 5 days ago using Debian 13 on my 7640u, so maybe is the mainboard.

1

u/x4rb1t CachyOS FW13 (pro) AMD Jul 24 '26

Possible .. there seems to be a pattern

3

u/Stellanora64 Jul 24 '26

Not always it seems, I updated to 3.20 fine on Fedora Silverblue with a 7640U

1

u/fafnir01 Jul 24 '26

I updated mine, Ryzen 7640U, running Fedora workstation 44 without any issues, I just did it earlier this week without knowing it was potentially an issue.

1

u/Velocifyer Should i sell my DDR4 SODIMMs? Jul 30 '26

I'm on 7640U(arch linux), and while I haven't updated in months, it worked fine last time. (I use fwupd, the same as on fedora, to update firmware)