Installing ROCK on a NUC .. BIOS flash, *.bio?

[David_CLIFF]

Thanks all for the helpful advice on this forum.

On the back of this, and being in Australia, I dont have access to a Nucleus One so I have bought off Amazon an (listed) i5 NUC … a bit hard to be sure I got what I needed in the shopping process (info is a bit skint), such as if it would run on AU power, did it already have memory, and a M.2 SSD, but yes, yes, yes, all I had to do was change the power cord (and even that was optional, a US - AU plug adapter would do the job)

Its a very neat bit of kit and I’m now working through the ROCK setup.

A note, and a question.

The first step in the instructions is to download and install the latest BIOS.

I’m pretty ok with this process, BUT:

1. The BIOS downloads for all NUCs are now on the ASUS pages so while there are notes about the NUC on the Intel pages, you have to go to the ASUS pages to get the latest BIOS

2. thats ok, but the instructions tell me to do an F7 (reboot) install of the *.bio file … sounds good, but there is no .bio file in the downloaded new BIOS

3. so I set the NUC up for Windows (which is its default) and used the Windows BIOS flash utility to install the latest BIOS file (which has a file type of *.CAP) … worked fine, and happily rebooted to Windows

Call me paranoid, but the instructions tell me to install a .bio file and there is an option of a LINUX BIOS or a Windows BIOS. I’ve used Windows to flash the new BIOS, should I have tried to flash the LINUX BIOS? My suspicion is that it shouldn’t matter, but the ROCK install instructions seem pretty determined

Welcome any thoughts on thus … tomorrow I’ll go hard core and reconfigure the NUC as a ROCK box

[Geoff_Coupe]

Frankly, I would have skipped the “install the latest BIOS” step. It is unlikely to be necessary.

That step was mandatory many years ago for the 6th generation of Intel NUCs that had a tendency to brick themselves because of an issue that was fixed by a BIOS release.

New NUC ROCK user - looking for help with how to upgrade BIOS from CAP file

It was the 6th generation NUCs… A problem with the voltage regulation circuitry meant the NUC could be bricked. Intel brought out a BIOS update that had to be applied to all NUCs out in the field.

[bearFNF]

To answer your main question, yes, there are “special” Linux BIOS that replaces the normal BIOS with a simple initialization phase and a gunzip of a Linux kernel. However, you don’t need that special BIOS, so don’t worry about it. Just go through the Rock install guide and set-up the BIOS the way it says to and you will be fine. Also, by putting the “windows” BIOS on you are future proofing in case you want to repurpose the NUC later. But, as has been said it “probably” wasn’t even necessary for you to update it anyway.

Just in case you didn’t see them:

ROCK Install Guide

ROCK: Configuring BIOS On Your NUC

[David_CLIFF]

Thanks for the replies … spent a couple (maybe 3+) of hours on this. Some learnings

1. The BIOS update is easy except you have to get the image from the ASUS site
2. The BIOS boot configuation etc. Looks nothing like the images in the guides so you have to sort of guess it
3. Just loading the ROCK image to a USB does nothing … it won’t be recognised as a bootable device
4. In fact, it wont even be recognised as mounted if the USB is exFAT or something … it needs to be just FAT32 (you can see it in device properties)
5. You need to flash it as a bootable USB. I used Etcher … fast, free, works like a charm and intuitive
6. Disabled Secure Boot, set USB, boot with F10 & selected the FAT32 USB …
   Worked like a charm

[Wade_Oram]

As has been said many times before (e.g. Installing ROCK on a NUC .. BIOS flash, *.bio? - #2 by Geoff_Coupe), on modern NUCs, the BIOS upgrade step can be ignored which makes points 1 and 2 moot.

Also, point 4 is largely unnecessary because using Balena Etcher (or Rufus) will partition and format the USB stick/drive as required. As long as the USB stick/drive is recognised by the machine runing Etcher or Rufus, it should work irrespective of any existing formatting.

[David_CLIFF]

Thanks Wade
I now understand this – the issue was I was trying to follow the guidelines on the ROON ROCK install pages and they need to be updated. I’d found bits of this across the forum (the BIOS issue).

I had missed this step in the install guide “Now that you’ve downloaded the image to another computer, you will need to write this image to a USB flash drive. You can do this by using Etcher, Rufus or by using the Linux Command Line as noted below.” which caught me out – once that was sorted, it all just happened like a charm