How to update Minisforum machines without Windows
You might have a few Minisforum machines (In my case my BD790i Proxmox cluster) running something else then Windows but would like to update the firmware, you can do so without having Windows installed following this guide!
Using the UEFI Shell option in the BIOS
The BIOS on Minisforum boards provides the ability to start a UEFI shell from the BIOS and use that to update the firmware. Minisforum firmware packages also include the program and batch files necessary to do so!
But you need to prepare a few things to make this work, by default hitting that button in the BIOS will basically do nothing. So let’s work through that!
Preparing a USB stick
Get a random USB stick, even a 512MB stick is going to be plenty!
Format using FAT32
Format the stick with FAT32 using the windows built-in format utility for instance.
Download the required files
We are going to need 2 files
1. EFI shell
To be able to boot to a UEFI shell we have to “install” one onto the USB stick, to do so download the latest release from here and drag “Shell.efi” to the USB stick.
Go to this github repo releases and download shellx64.efi and copy that file to the root of the USB stick we formatted in the previous step.
(I used a slightly different EFI shell myself from this archive, you then just copy Shell.efi to the root of the USB drive but the newer one linked above should work just as well)
2. Firmware and flashing utility
You can find the firmware downloads for Minisforum machines and motherboards here. In my case I have 3x BD790i and those can be found here. Go to the Downloads tab and select “BIOS & Firmware” and there you can see which versions are available.
In my case I’m upgrading my machines from v1.09 to v1.12!
Once you’ve downloaded the ZIP file, extract it’s contents to the root of the same USB drive.
In the end it should a like this:
BIOS settings
Insert the USB flash drive into the computer you want to flash and turn it on and go to the BIOS (Del key while it’s starting up).
Before we can flash you probably need to fix something in the BIOS but you can try if it’s not required in your case.
In my case I tried to access the UEFI Shell from the BIOS and was greeted with the following screen:
and it would not allow me to proceed!
Disabling secure boot
Turns out the above error is caused because secure boot is enabled for some reason, we need to turn it off. But the options by default are grayed out and we can’t do so.
To enable being able to change these settings we first need to set an Administrator password and maybe also user password. In my case I set them both to some simple password. Once that’s done, save and reboot.
Once you’ve rebooted it should look like this:
Now you can go into the Secure Boot menu and change the settings there!
Set the “secure boot” to disabled and the “secure boot mode” to custom and then hit the “restore factory keys” option that’s now selectable. It will ask if you are sure and to reboot, acknowledge and the system should restart, enter the BIOS again (with the USB stick still inserted) and you should now be able to open the UEFI shell from the main menu!
EFI shell commands
Once you have booted into the UEFI shell it will look something like this:
We need to find what the USB flash drive was mapped to as a drive letter so do the following:
FS0: dir
If you don’t see the files, go to FS1:, FS2: and so on until you do see them like this:
Once you are there we are almost done, just type “EfiFlash.nsh” and hit enter and the flashing process should begin!
It’s being flashed!
Flashing should proceed automatically.
it takes a bit
some more to go
almost there!
This is almost at the end, after that the system will reboot automatically. Since all BIOS options will have been reset it will have to do memory training again and this can take a little while, give it a good 5 to 10 minutes to come back.
All done!
That’s it, you are done, the BIOS should now be upgraded to the latest version you downloaded.
Make sure to set any custom settings in the BIOS again (SR-IOV, PCIe BiFurcation x4x4x4x4, Graphics 1GB, etc. etc.) and then you should be set. Hope this guide helped you flash the BIOS of a Minisforum machine without needing Windows!