When a BIOS update goes bad!

The BIOS update a scary update that might mess up your PC if it goes wrong.

So recently i wanted to play a Blu Ray disk i bought on Amazon and i remembered (probaly wrongly) that the BIOS of my motherboard the MSI 450 a Pro Max had problems with the Blu ray drive i have the Pioneer BD-202.

So i had the bright idea of rolling back the BIOS to see if that would fix it. I had done so 3 times previosly and there was no problems that was until an ipdate that made my CPU work the motherboard.

AMI BIOS 7B86vMC

Description:

  •  Optimized and support AMD Ryzen 5000 series processors.

Basially this update made the motherboard work with AMD Ryzen 5600 CPU’s and rolling it back past this update would “probably” break the compatability.

Now i knew this was kinda stupid but i wanted to see if a previous BIOS update would make the Blu-Ray drive work properly.

Disaster:
BIOS updated but when the PC went to reboot there was nothing put the white motherboard light on and nothing on the screen. it was at that moment i knew i had fucked up!

USB M Flash:
I knew there was a way to recovery if i could rollback the update but how. id never used this feature before on any motherboard and since nothing came up when the PC came on how would i even enable this recovery mode which is called “M-Flash”.

Mikes Unboxing Video:
so i googled this motherboard and the bios and was searching for some way to fix the mess i had made and i found this video and i cannot thank this guy enough for making a video like this.

What i needed:

  • USB Flash Drive
  • A Working BIOS Rom file
  • Way to move and rename the BIOS File

Problem:
I only had my phone and had no access to a laptop or other PC.  i had to copy the BIOS file to the root folder of the USB drive and rename it to “MSI.ROM”.

Without a PC this would normally be impossable but i remembered that i had saved the BIOS working previous update on the flash drive i was using and only needed a way to rename and move the file.  How to do this with no PC?

The flash drive i had both a USB A and USB micro connector and my phone was now USB C. It was a Sandisk 16Gb drive.

How to connect a USB C Slot to the Flash drive. A few months ago i ordfered a Pen mouse from Amazon;

CestMall 2.4GHz USB Wireless Optical Pen Shaped Mouse Adjustable 800/1200/1600 DPI Handwriting Smart Mouse for Laptop Android Tablet PC-Blue

I remember at the time if had some weird adapters for it. I thought to myself i will never need them but i kept the box for some reason and when i opened it to see what adapters were inside it;

When i connected the Flash drive and adapter see below;

Two USB adapters
The handy USB C to USB A adapter that came with the USB Pen.

My phone was able to detect it as a Flash drive and now all i had to move the file to root dir of the flash drive.

Doing the Flashback.

This is where the youtuber Mikes Unboxing Video’s saved the day. He went through the process of how to get the motherboard to “re-flash” or “flashback” to different BIOS version.

After putting the BIOS that was working fine in the root folder of the flash drive and renaming it as per intructions.

  • Power off PC
  • insert flash drive to the correct slot on back of motherboard
  • hold down the bios button near the USB slot until PC comes on
  • once the BIOS light at the back of the motherboard starts flashing wait!

This process was nerve wracking it took 5 agonising mintutes of waiting to see if i would have to my PC back and luckily it came back to life.

Huge thanks to Mikes Unboxing, give him a sub on youtube at;
https://www.youtube.com/@mikesunboxing

 

How to enable Blu-Ray support in VLC media player

Playing Blu-Ray discs in windows 10 is a bit og a pain.  In order to get it to work you have to go through a few hoops with VLC.

https://vlc-bluray.whoknowsmy.name/

Part A: Keys database

Create the folder “C:\ProgramData\aacs\”

Download keys.cfg from the link and place in the folder you created “C:\ProgramData\aacs\”

Note:
finding keysdb.cfg file isnt available at that site for some reason anymore.

Part B: AACS dynamic library

Depending on the version of VLC you have you just need to copy this dll file into the same directory.

VLC 32 bit on Windows: put that file in your VLC directory
VLC 64 bit on Windows: put that file in your VLC directory

HackTheBox: FFUF not showing file sizes in Kali console

Was working my way through the exercises on hackthebox.com and every FFUF scan was saying the file size as 0.

 

 

 

 

 

Turns out it was Bitdefender’ “Online Threat Protection” ->”Network threat protection”.

This blocks the filesize of FFUF results so the will come out as 0 if you are connected using VirtualBox.

 

Linux Parrot-OS How to switch window control box to right side

ParrotOS is another nice Security based Debian Linux Distro i found the other week but if your a windows user the placement of the “minimise and maximise” windows buttons is very frustating as there on the left side.

Open the menu and select “Control Center”. Then from the “Look and feel” section select “MATE Tweak” and then from the left side pick “Windows”.

Change the “Window control placement” from left to right.

Parrot Security (ParrotOS, Parrot) is a Free and Open source GNU/Linux distribution based on Debian Stable designed for security experts, developers and privacy aware people.

It includes a full portable arsenal for IT security and digital forensics operations. It also includes everything you need to develop your own programs or protect your privacy while surfing the net.

Parrot is available in three main editions, SecurityHome and Architect Edition, even as Virtual Machine (Virtual Box, Parallels and VMware), on Raspberry Pi and also on Docker.

From version 5.0 LTS, support for ARM platforms (arm64 and armhf) is back, and some images are also available for boards like Raspberry Pi.

The operating system ships by default with MATE Desktop Environment, but it is possible to install others DEs.

https://www.parrotsec.org/

Kali 2020.2 Linux Update Problem

If your getting this error while trying to update Kali Linux via with sudo apt update

Get:1 http://kali.download/kali kali-rolling InRelease [41.2 kB]
Err:1 http://kali.download/kali kali-rolling InRelease
The following signatures were invalid: EXPKEYSIG ED444FF07D8D0BF6 Kali Linux Repository <[email protected]>
Reading package lists... Done
W: GPG error: http://kali.download/kali kali-rolling InRelease: The following signatures were invalid: EXPKEYSIG ED444FF07D8D0BF6 Kali Linux Repository <[email protected]>
E: The repository 'http://http.kali.org/kali kali-rolling InRelease' is not signed.
N: Updating from such a repository can't be done securely, and is therefore disabled by default.
N: See apt-secure(8) manpage for repository creation and user configuration details.

The solution is to run the command;
sudo wget -q -O - archive.kali.org/archive-key.asc | sudo apt-key add

 

Huge thanks to the kalitut.com for this solution, i  had no idea how to fix it.

how to update Kali Linux and Fix update error – KaliTut

Quest 2 & Microsoft Flight Simulator Stuttering Performance Problem

Every time i would put on the Quest 2 VR headset in game and in the Oculus home screen would lag down to 8fps.

It would do this every time i put on the headset when it was linked up via a USB 3.0 cable.  The headset had no problems with any other game and the game ran fine when in non VR mode.  The PC was Windows 10 fully updated with drivers and updates.

So i tried everything i could think of to fix this problem and it was alot.

  • Latest BETA Oculus Software
  • Latest BETA Graphics Card Drivers
  • Uninstall & Reinstall of Graphics cards with clean install and DDU
  • Lowering graphics settings in game
  • Windows 11
  • Complete Reinstall of Windows 10
  • Oculus Tray Tool
  • Power Plan settings

The reinstall:
This was where most PC problems get resolved and at first when i booted the game up up with a brand new Windows 10 install the game ran fine in VR.

Then i thought the problem was fixed so as i began reinstalling software like Steam,Visual Studio,Visual Code,Bit defender.  The problem unexpectedly started happening again which was incredibly frustrating to say the least.

then i had an Eureka moment, the problem seemed to come back when i reinstalled Bit-defender.  So i thought it must be interfering  somehow with the game?

Exclusions:
I then fired up the Bit defender settings and added the folder where the game is installed to the Exclusion list of Bit defender.

MSFS main folder added as an exclusion in bitdefender.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

After trying the game again with the new settings in Bit defender, the stuttering and loss of fps went away!