Two boards, one chip. The ASUS board has bad firmware from a power loss during a firmware upgrade. Not bricked though, and we certainly didn’t by a dip programmer specifically for it or another board. Fixing the “bricked” ASUS P8Z68 was as simple as booting the junk Zotac board (which is a totally different architecture) into some random linux distro that included flashrom, downloading a bios update (.bin) from ASUS, and hotswapping, yes hot freaking swapping the motherboard’s EEPROM while in gnome with a terminal open (do this also if you can’t find a way to boot to dos for junk mobo bios updates – minus the hotswap of course).

After the swap I did the following:

  sudo flashrom -r bkup.bin
  sudo flashrom -w biosupdate.bin

Then I shut the junk Zotac off, put the EEPROM in its original owner and booted it up without an issue since.

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