Another fateful day in early October 2020, I updated a customer's BIOS on their new custom PC build, with a Gigabyte B450M DS3H motherboard.

It bricked itself. I flashed BIOS update image in QFlash, and everything went through normal and 100% completion, but failed on reboot. Motherboard wouldn't respond to powering off even, LEDs on the motherboard just blinked if I held power.

I first tried to powercycle and reset the CMOS, and even left peripherals and CMOS disconnected overnight. Still no fix.

So I went home that night and brought my CH341A SPI programmer with SOIC-8 clip to work. Booted my Fedora laptop, plugged in my CH341A, following one of the many walkthroughs online for properly connecting the whole thing... I ran flashrom to test if I could even read the BIOS chip first, then after confirming that, I jumped straight into flashing the latest BIOS update from Gigabyte to the chip. And it worked :)

I didn't take any pictures of me actually connecting it, because I was so busy worrying about if it would succeed. Heres a few photos though, of the hardware I used, and where I found the BIOS chip on the motherboard, pretty easy to identify on this model.