If the BIOS gets corrupted or damaged, the hardware will have no gateway to receive initiation signals. Then, your system will not boot at all and your motherboard will be considered bricked. Having said that, it is also not an everyday thing for the BIOS to get damaged. We most often corrupt the firmware while updating BIOS. But your customized BIOS settings do get lost most of the time due to a faulty CMOS battery, by changing to default settings manually, or automatically because of system error. Whatever the case, be it for recovery of BIOS or for loading your customized settings, it is better to backup the BIOS. It is quite easy to backup BIOS for some motherboards but for others, it can be quite tricky and you might need a few workarounds. Nevertheless, you will be comfortable to backup the BIOS in your system after going through this article.
Before Backing Up the BIOS
You are probably looking to backup the BIOS as a preventive measure if something goes wrong while updating it. However, if you are able to resolve the issues on the motherboard or revert the settings that are causing you problems beforehand, you will not need to update or backup the BIOS. If the problem lies on the motherboard setting, you may reset the board. To do so, you can either change the settings to default either from the BIOS page or clear the CMOS by removing the CMOS battery from the motherboard. Similarly, if you are unable to boot your system, you can try to boot into secondary BIOS as some motherboards provide such dual-BIOS nowadays. Apart from these, sometimes changing boot mode to either UEFI or Legacy in BIOS also does the trick. See if your problem is resolved after trying these steps. And if not, let’s move towards backing up the BIOS.
Backup Only The BIOS Settings of Motherboard
If you just want to backup your modified BIOS settings for future, you can manually note them down on your notebook or phone. You can also use a Frame Grabber to capture your BIOS or record the settings on your phone. Then, use that as your reference to change the BIOS settings. Some motherboards also provide a list of changed settings when you try to load default settings on BIOS. After you press the key to Load Default settings, it will show you your customized settings that will be changed to default. You can take a screenshot of the settings there. But, you should not apply the changes after pressing the Load Default key, otherwise, you might accidentally reset them without noting the modifications.
Backup BIOS of Your Motherboard
Flashing a motherboard’s BIOS involves a few dangers. As we said earlier, if you installed the BIOS using a corrupted file, your system might get permanently damaged. So, most of the motherboards do not provide the feature to backup their BIOS to prevent users from updating BIOS from a corrupted backup, in case. However, all motherboards have a function to update BIOS. You might be looking to backup BIOS to get back to this version at the time of need later. So, you can take advantage of the Update BIOS feature to downgrade your BIOS to the one you want. Let’s see what you need for this and the process of doing it. Since it requires few precautions and has several methods, we have prepared a separate comprehensive guide for updating the BIOS.
Backup BIOS in Motherboard with Q-Flash Feature
If your system’s BIOS has a Q-Flash feature, you are in luck here. It is a feature provided in some motherboards with the primary purpose of updating the BIOS. But it also has the function to back up your system’s BIOS. One of the motherboards to feature Q-flash is Gigabyte. Hence, we are using the system with a Gigabyte motherboard to explain the process. You will just need a USB drive to save the backup with this method. You now have a backup image of your current BIOS version. You can perform this process using the BIOS utility or Motherboard utility tool provided by your vendor if it has the Q-flash option. The steps are similar and you can open the utility from Windows itself.
Backup BIOS in Windows
If your motherboard is the one that does not provide the option to backup BIOS, you can do it directly from Windows. You will have to take help from third-party applications to do it for you. One of such programs that accommodate the function of backup BIOS is the Universal BIOS Backup Toolkit. Let’s see how you can do this using the Universal BIOS Backup Toolkit on your system. You will find the backup file of your BIOS in the drive.
Backup BIOS Using CH341a Programmer
CH341a programmer is a USB-like device that is used to flash the IC of several electronics including the EEPROM of a computer. The BIOS is contained in the EEPROM of a computer. Hence, you can use the CH341a programmer to detect, change, backup as well as update the BIOS of your motherboard. The programmer can be used for 24-series I2C and 25-series SPI IC chips of any system. Let’s look at the connection you have to make and the steps to be followed to backup BIOS using the CH341a programmer. You can use this backup image to flash your BIOS later.
How to Restore the Backup BIOS in Windows?
It is not helpful to backup your BIOS and not know how to install it in the time of need. But installing the BIOS from the backup image is pretty much the same as updating the BIOS. Some motherboards like Gigabyte automatically boot into backup bios if the current BIOS fails and re-flashes it. You must know that updating or restoring BIOS is risky and it might permanently damage your computer. Hence, you have to make sure to have a stable power supply. You can use a UPS for a desktop computer while reinstalling BIOS. Also, please do not close the system in the middle of the process. Now that you know about the risk and the safety measures, you will just need a USB drive and software called Rufus to make the drive bootable. Let’s see the way to install the backup .rom file to your system. You will find your BIOS restored from the backup file that you created earlier.
