MSI 880gm-E41 BUOS backup and upgrade procedures

[loninappleton]

Hello and my first post in here and BIOS mods.

  This older board MSI 880gm-E41 is too cryptic for me to understand.  Initially I had the error of not using
a thumb drive in FAT32.  I now have that.

  Major Geeks has a Universlal Bios Backup freeware.  I ran that and it seemed to go ok

  There are 8 BIOS upgrades for this MSI board.  I selected to download the one immediately
follwoing what is on the board and I've not done the procedure before.

  Errors appear at the old style MSI 880 BIOS screen.  And there are instructions as to when to
insert or remove the FAT32 pen drive.  Also something about renaming conventions and
an obscure file type.    I have seen the text file that downloads with the selected BIOS download.
There's just not enough to follow on the M-Flash single screen to proceed.

   After all the time passed since this board was new,  perhaps someone with the same
motherboard then or now can give a complete procedure.

   My feeling has been that thare's a manual page missing from the whole operation.
There is nothing in the user guide I have about any of it. 

    The 880gm  board works fine.  I'm hoping for efficiencies for using an SSD and perhaps
more memory.

[loninappleton]

MSI has a tool to upgrade the BIOS.  My motherboard is an MSI 880gm-e41.
At minimum I want to flash the upgrade that allows for 6 core CPU.

I have practiced with the tool and it runs successfully.  But each time I return to check the version
there is no change either by number or date of issue.  I have also checked this with the
CMD in Win7

I would pursue this at MSI but login is a daisy chain of repeatable steps
where I am always greeted as guest.   I don't want to return there for this.

  The USB device is a 16 GB Sandisk Cruzer that looks like a peanut.
I have been through all the steps of the upgrade tool as described. 
The Sandisk shows formated to Fat32.  It's bare and unbootable.

  Is this a wrong size to do this job (larger than 4 GB?
Can a format of the USB be done to correct this with a partition.

  Can I execute this in DOS with some careful guidance?

  I'm out of ideas on what looks like an easy task that completes but shows no upgrade.

[loninappleton]

Hello and my first post in here and BIOS mods.

  This older board MSI 880gm-E41 is too cryptic for me to understand.  Initially I had the error of not using
a thumb drive in FAT32.  I now have that.

  Major Geeks has a Universlal Bios Backup freeware.  I ran that and it seemed to go ok

  There are 8 BIOS upgrades for this MSI board.  I selected to download the one immediately
follwoing what is on the board and I've not done the procedure before.

  Errors appear at the old style MSI 880 BIOS screen.  And there are instructions as to when to
insert or remove the FAT32 pen drive.  Also something about renaming conventions and
an obscure file type.    I have seen the text file that downloads with the selected BIOS download.
There's just not enough to follow on the M-Flash single screen to proceed.

   After all the time passed since this board was new,  perhaps someone with the same
motherboard then or now can give a complete procedure.

   My feeling has been that thare's a manual page missing from the whole operation.
There is nothing in the user guide I have about any of it. 

    The 880gm  board works fine.  I'm hoping for efficiencies for using an SSD and perhaps
more memory.

[loninappleton]

I am finally on the path to getting this job done. MSI BIOS tool works fine but I was neglecting the final step
to complete the procedure which is reboot from the USB drive which, having been set up to boot by
the MSI program loads to complete the procedure.

Pardon the duplicate post but what I haven't seen here is the usual My Posts lookup to make
responses.