Using Env Flash: A Cautionary Tale

I'm not going to do a tutorial on how to use env flash, because I want to emphasize that you can easily brick your graphics cards by putting the wrong BIOS on them. For example, take the Nvidia 2080 Ti reference card and an EVGA SC ultra or XC ultra, which are based on the same reference PCB but have custom BIOS with different boost clocks. Many people try to use these higher boost clock BIOS on their regular vanilla cards, which can lead to issues such as subset mismatch and device ID mismatches.

To overcome these problems, you need to override them. However, this process is not foolproof, especially when dealing with different revisions of the graphics card die. For instance, there were different revisions of the 700 series era, such as a1, b1, etc., which can lead to compatibility issues if you use the wrong BIOS on the wrong revision.

When using env link, I don't want to type in long command lines, so I simply rename my files to make them more manageable. For example, instead of typing "msi gtx 1650 409 6.1 9:02 1:9 Dom", I'll use a shorter name like "don't die dot-com". However, please note that this is not a recommended practice, and you should exercise caution when working with command lines.

To set up env flash, you need to create a file structure with the correct folders. There are three types of flashes: 64-bit, 32-bit (not recommended), and 64-bit for 64-bit operating systems. When using Windows 10 or 7, you can no longer run command prompts in certain situations, so you need to open Command Prompt as administrator.

To use env flash, follow these steps:

1. Set the file structure as desired.

2. Go to the Start menu and type "Command Prompt" to open it.

3. Right-click on the Command Prompt window and select "Run as administrator".

4. Type "env flash 64" (or 32-bit for older systems) and press Enter.

Note that env flash will disable the driver, which is necessary for updating the EEPROM and flashing the BIOS image. However, this process can be problematic if you're not careful.

In my previous experience, I flashed a wrong BIOS on one of my graphics cards, and it worked initially. However, when I restarted the computer, the system couldn't recognize the card's EEPROM, and even when we tried to identify the card using specialized software, it said "no card present". This was not an issue with the graphics card itself but rather a problem with the port.

To troubleshoot this issue, you can try booting off a different graphics card or using env link to flash the BIOS on another card. I've shown examples of how to do this in previous videos.

In conclusion, using env flash requires caution and careful attention to detail. If you're not experienced with flashing BIOS images, it's recommended to exercise extreme care when working with command lines and to seek guidance from experts if needed.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enokay so we're gonna revisit this video where we won't say we all won't I will put that evil on Phil although he condoned and shot the video as well we are going to see if we can't get this 1050 back to life because plenty of you guys were like Jay it's probably not dead you probably this is probably that it's probably we're aware of all that stuff and we're gonna see today if we can't get it back because I have a theory as to what happened but before that listen to this message from our sponsor today's video sponsored by drop and the Sennheiser PC 37 X professional-grade gaming headset Sennheiser is known for their legendary sound quality and gaming headsets are known for the legendary suck quality but now you can have the best of both worlds without compromising mic quality making it the perfect choice for gamers and professionals alike the detachable ten-foot cable and 3.5 millimeter plugs ensure maximum compatibility while running your own amplifiers without taking up an additional USB slot to learn more about the sennheiser pc 37 x from drop click the link in the description below if you're not aware that i should mute my watch if you haven't watched the first part of this video that we released on halloween you should go and watch that first you understand what happened and well okay we doused it with water and Windex just to see how much it could take surprise it took a lot of water to make this thing no longer boot so if you want to see how we reached the point of where we are today then go and check that video out but what we're gonna show you I know is that the system will output VGA brighter so you just got a blue light we're gonna go to the BIOS here in a sec this monitor takes minute turn on see we've got video so we know that this is outputting something but the problem is every time we clean the driver off when we sue this suit into boot mode we boot into safe mode we can ddu the driver but the problem is as soon as we start to reinstall the driver then the GPU goes corrupt we get black screen the fans go to a hundred percent so my theory here is not that we killed the graphics card because we showed them that video too I know it keeps me we didn't the video you should go watch it honestly but what we showed in that video is how we corrupted the driver but getting it back by doing the driver wipe with ddu in safe mode was no longer working but my next theory here is that week the BIOS because seeing the screen go black and the fans go to 100% is very indicative to of a BIOS failure so I think that is happening when we go to right to the right the driver is it's communicating with the card and the BIOS is just working so that's my theory the other thing I'm gonna do - just to rule out BIOS in any way cuz someone did point out like Jay you really if you were dousing the motherboard - right because like that spray was going everywhere all over the motherboard as well the motherboard held up I think pretty well so I'm gonna save this particular profile and then what we're gonna do here is a test bench Oh see okay good and state - profile 1 yes we are gonna also reset optimise defaults and I'm just gonna see if we can do it's also been sitting now for like five days solid so a lot of you were like this probably still water in here or there water could have gotten sucked into the fan somehow and got to the other underside or got in the core or something so a lot of you guys just were like hey do the thing where you let it dry out for a while I didn't stick another bag of rice the humidity's been like single digits here for the last week so trust me when I say any moisture in there is wycked out now so oh it's going right to repair which is kind of fine that's probably does have all the filled boots we had earlier Pepperidge Farms remembers so I'm just gonna go right to restart my pc I'm not gonna go straight to to safe mode yet because it will boot in safe mode because it just loads to the basic VGA driver like you saw right there but what you'll see here is that we'll go to the windows little spinning wheel and then it'll just go black screen as soon as it tries to switch to desktop mode unless of course it just suddenly is working which I'm kind of hoping isn't the case what okay so this is the part of I was like CEO told you we still just wet now Phil saw later on that day it was completely dry I came out here multiple times trying to boot this system and it wouldn't boot well then I wanted to show you guys had to get back your BIOS I mean it's not like this card didn't go through hell or anything J is stupid and did stupid stuff that's what happened here but that's okay I do the stupid stuff so you don't have to at least that's the story I'm sticking dude so should I put the riser back on and the DisplayPort alright riser card and DisplayPort because all that water was also going on the riser card oh this is what we were experiencing so it's one of those two things if for some reason I take the riser card often it's still doing it then we try a different cable if that doesn't work and then we can try the BIOS flash because the BIOS flash just sort of resets everything and there's nothing wrong with that I mean let's say this is your card and this is what you're experiencing you got nothing to lose right - by trying alright same thing without the riser card so we know it's not the riser card so this is the port I was on the bottom port for DisplayPort this particular card has two ports some go to that one okay this is a different port so I think we killed the bottom port that's all it was do all the comments that I read I don't recall anyone pointing out like we probably killed the port a lot of people were just telling me let it dry out which is kind of the obvious thing a lot of people were also telling me that probably corroded but I highly doubt CRO you I mean corrosion can happen that quickly in the perfect environment but typically when you're dealing with things like with aluminium aluminium and all that I have no idea what the I guess was solder and stuff there's it wasn't corrosion okay I promise wasn't corrosion but look its back so maybe we should just do a bio slash now to see if we can't get that court to come back I don't think it's gonna help because we probably physically damage the port but I want to show you guys how to do a BIOS recovery so maybe we'll just go and do that what you say for for 108 let's just see if the driver install can at least complete because that's not something that would do before I remember that near well for for 108 installed we were gonna put it on that on that pegboard as a display piece kind of like that X 299 dark is over there it's all edged and nasty and gross because of all the overclocking stuff we did on it and that working perfectly fine but that's the that's the one that we had finally beat Steve with and so it's got some sentimental value you know the board still works we were gonna put this up there as the wall of hero right because this thing was a trooper and it died valiantly in it it went down with its colors flying this is that soldier that you have that that funeral for back home and then he just walked in one day actually you know you know what this is I was presumed dead and so the squad had no choice but to leave because I know no man left behind or whatever but he's presumed dead because he was in a patch of trees and then the trees exploded you're like know who Billy think we gotta go and he leave Billy behind it Billy's like guys I'm right here that's what happened bro it wasn't actually that broken anyway what we need to do right now is we need to go ahead and download and be flash and all that stuff and then I'll show you guys where to go to get the BIOS and all that as much as I even hate showing their logo on my channel because that's stupid news article they posted a couple weeks ago techpowerup has a video bios collection and these are submitted by users and stuff users like you and me and so anyway what I do is I downloaded gpu-z so that we can verify all the information on this BIOS even though the BIOS version on here which on how well it shows up on screen but Phil can annotate 90.1 7.1 c0 0.9 one now the vials bios version that's listed here is ninety dot 17.1 a0 0.68 this is from two nineteen twenty nineteen so this is well at nine months old I have no idea which BIOS is newer so what I'm gonna do right now because not sure which is newer I'm gonna go ahead and save this BIOS by clicking the little box right here save to file BIOS reading not supported on this device or not so we won't be saving that last and then we're gonna have to download it to utility called env flash and basically env flash is just the tool that you can use to force BIOS flashing now I'm not doing a tutorial on how to use env flash I'm just telling you the process on how to do this and the reason why I'm not doing a tutorial on how to use env flash is simply because of the fact that you can very easily brick your graphics cards by putting the wrong BIOS on there so for instance when you have like a reference card let's say the Nvidia 2080 ti reference and then you've got the EVGA SC ultra or XC ultra which is based on the same reference PCB but has a custom BIOS on there with different boost clocks and stuff you what a lot people do is they'll take those higher boost clock BIOS and flash them onto their regular vanilla cards the problem is that doesn't always work you'll get subset mismatch you'll get all kinds of device ID mismatches and you've got to override those to say yes I know it's not the same flash it while depending on like back in like the 700 series era there was also different revisions to the actual die itself so you'd have like a1 b1 stuff like that and you could put a wrong BIOS on the wrong revision brick your your graphics card and never get it to come back ask me how I know that oh you know the funny you should ask I actually made a video about it now when we use env link I don't want to have to type in msi gtx 1650 409 6.1 9:02 1:9 Dom so I'm just gonna rename it to don't die dot-com forgot ROM I don't know a website I probably wouldn't go there if I were you just by the sounds of it alright so now with envy flash downloaded and extracted into the same folder as our ROM you can set the file structure however you want you have any flash 64 in MV flash NV flash is for 32-bit no one should be running 32-bit in 2019 for any reason whatsoever and then NV flash 64 for 64-bit operating systems now you used to be older in Windows 10 or Windows 7 like right click and like run command prompt here but you can't do that crap anymore so now you need to go over to your Start menu and do command or come over to that right click run as administrator if you don't have administrator privileges this is not going to work and then don't die romp hey I remember how to do a things crazy okay update display driver firmware yes to confirm any of a key to abort yes what you just heard it do was actually disable the driver which I forgot to do manually but fortunately MV flash will do it for you now it's now writing the EEPROM it's now flashing the image to our latest ROM that we put on there verifying the update firmware image as now just broken your system that's actually somewhat normal because the thing is it's running still off of the previous loaded BIOS until you restart so when I actually flashed the wrong BIOS on my previous graphics card okay it worked and then I restarted the computer and it never came back in fact it was so broken that it the graphics card itself was not even like identifiable to the system in fact we tried everything we possibly could to get that EEPROM to rewrite but it was so broken that even when we would identify graphics cards it just said VGA that was it but it still gave you no picture whatsoever and what we did we did was the old trick of like have two graphics cards in the system at the same time boot off the good one and then envy flash to the second card because you could tell it which card you want to flash to we showed how to do all that we did our tighten our TX BIOS upgrades it just was like no card present so anyway let's now do this let me shut this down and we are going to now put our power or our graphics chord or display port into the bottom one so what died obviously was the port this graphics card is still perfectly fine and if you were one of those people I I didn't see anyone say J you probably just killed the port but if you did type that in the thousands of comments that I can't possibly read through kudos to you well it's still alive which kind of sucks in a way because we wanted to send this thing off where's my blowtorch alright guys thanks for watching at least today we got to show you some of the troubleshooting methods also how to reflash the BIOS and I guess that's what we showed you today so thanks for watching and as always we'll see you in the next one where don't ask me how we managed to overpressurize the system enough to rip a valve in half but let's just say we were experimenting with things and pressures and that happened by the way so if you guys I can't incriminate myself we'll see you in the nightokay so we're gonna revisit this video where we won't say we all won't I will put that evil on Phil although he condoned and shot the video as well we are going to see if we can't get this 1050 back to life because plenty of you guys were like Jay it's probably not dead you probably this is probably that it's probably we're aware of all that stuff and we're gonna see today if we can't get it back because I have a theory as to what happened but before that listen to this message from our sponsor today's video sponsored by drop and the Sennheiser PC 37 X professional-grade gaming headset Sennheiser is known for their legendary sound quality and gaming headsets are known for the legendary suck quality but now you can have the best of both worlds without compromising mic quality making it the perfect choice for gamers and professionals alike the detachable ten-foot cable and 3.5 millimeter plugs ensure maximum compatibility while running your own amplifiers without taking up an additional USB slot to learn more about the sennheiser pc 37 x from drop click the link in the description below if you're not aware that i should mute my watch if you haven't watched the first part of this video that we released on halloween you should go and watch that first you understand what happened and well okay we doused it with water and Windex just to see how much it could take surprise it took a lot of water to make this thing no longer boot so if you want to see how we reached the point of where we are today then go and check that video out but what we're gonna show you I know is that the system will output VGA brighter so you just got a blue light we're gonna go to the BIOS here in a sec this monitor takes minute turn on see we've got video so we know that this is outputting something but the problem is every time we clean the driver off when we sue this suit into boot mode we boot into safe mode we can ddu the driver but the problem is as soon as we start to reinstall the driver then the GPU goes corrupt we get black screen the fans go to a hundred percent so my theory here is not that we killed the graphics card because we showed them that video too I know it keeps me we didn't the video you should go watch it honestly but what we showed in that video is how we corrupted the driver but getting it back by doing the driver wipe with ddu in safe mode was no longer working but my next theory here is that week the BIOS because seeing the screen go black and the fans go to 100% is very indicative to of a BIOS failure so I think that is happening when we go to right to the right the driver is it's communicating with the card and the BIOS is just working so that's my theory the other thing I'm gonna do - just to rule out BIOS in any way cuz someone did point out like Jay you really if you were dousing the motherboard - right because like that spray was going everywhere all over the motherboard as well the motherboard held up I think pretty well so I'm gonna save this particular profile and then what we're gonna do here is a test bench Oh see okay good and state - profile 1 yes we are gonna also reset optimise defaults and I'm just gonna see if we can do it's also been sitting now for like five days solid so a lot of you were like this probably still water in here or there water could have gotten sucked into the fan somehow and got to the other underside or got in the core or something so a lot of you guys just were like hey do the thing where you let it dry out for a while I didn't stick another bag of rice the humidity's been like single digits here for the last week so trust me when I say any moisture in there is wycked out now so oh it's going right to repair which is kind of fine that's probably does have all the filled boots we had earlier Pepperidge Farms remembers so I'm just gonna go right to restart my pc I'm not gonna go straight to to safe mode yet because it will boot in safe mode because it just loads to the basic VGA driver like you saw right there but what you'll see here is that we'll go to the windows little spinning wheel and then it'll just go black screen as soon as it tries to switch to desktop mode unless of course it just suddenly is working which I'm kind of hoping isn't the case what okay so this is the part of I was like CEO told you we still just wet now Phil saw later on that day it was completely dry I came out here multiple times trying to boot this system and it wouldn't boot well then I wanted to show you guys had to get back your BIOS I mean it's not like this card didn't go through hell or anything J is stupid and did stupid stuff that's what happened here but that's okay I do the stupid stuff so you don't have to at least that's the story I'm sticking dude so should I put the riser back on and the DisplayPort alright riser card and DisplayPort because all that water was also going on the riser card oh this is what we were experiencing so it's one of those two things if for some reason I take the riser card often it's still doing it then we try a different cable if that doesn't work and then we can try the BIOS flash because the BIOS flash just sort of resets everything and there's nothing wrong with that I mean let's say this is your card and this is what you're experiencing you got nothing to lose right - by trying alright same thing without the riser card so we know it's not the riser card so this is the port I was on the bottom port for DisplayPort this particular card has two ports some go to that one okay this is a different port so I think we killed the bottom port that's all it was do all the comments that I read I don't recall anyone pointing out like we probably killed the port a lot of people were just telling me let it dry out which is kind of the obvious thing a lot of people were also telling me that probably corroded but I highly doubt CRO you I mean corrosion can happen that quickly in the perfect environment but typically when you're dealing with things like with aluminium aluminium and all that I have no idea what the I guess was solder and stuff there's it wasn't corrosion okay I promise wasn't corrosion but look its back so maybe we should just do a bio slash now to see if we can't get that court to come back I don't think it's gonna help because we probably physically damage the port but I want to show you guys how to do a BIOS recovery so maybe we'll just go and do that what you say for for 108 let's just see if the driver install can at least complete because that's not something that would do before I remember that near well for for 108 installed we were gonna put it on that on that pegboard as a display piece kind of like that X 299 dark is over there it's all edged and nasty and gross because of all the overclocking stuff we did on it and that working perfectly fine but that's the that's the one that we had finally beat Steve with and so it's got some sentimental value you know the board still works we were gonna put this up there as the wall of hero right because this thing was a trooper and it died valiantly in it it went down with its colors flying this is that soldier that you have that that funeral for back home and then he just walked in one day actually you know you know what this is I was presumed dead and so the squad had no choice but to leave because I know no man left behind or whatever but he's presumed dead because he was in a patch of trees and then the trees exploded you're like know who Billy think we gotta go and he leave Billy behind it Billy's like guys I'm right here that's what happened bro it wasn't actually that broken anyway what we need to do right now is we need to go ahead and download and be flash and all that stuff and then I'll show you guys where to go to get the BIOS and all that as much as I even hate showing their logo on my channel because that's stupid news article they posted a couple weeks ago techpowerup has a video bios collection and these are submitted by users and stuff users like you and me and so anyway what I do is I downloaded gpu-z so that we can verify all the information on this BIOS even though the BIOS version on here which on how well it shows up on screen but Phil can annotate 90.1 7.1 c0 0.9 one now the vials bios version that's listed here is ninety dot 17.1 a0 0.68 this is from two nineteen twenty nineteen so this is well at nine months old I have no idea which BIOS is newer so what I'm gonna do right now because not sure which is newer I'm gonna go ahead and save this BIOS by clicking the little box right here save to file BIOS reading not supported on this device or not so we won't be saving that last and then we're gonna have to download it to utility called env flash and basically env flash is just the tool that you can use to force BIOS flashing now I'm not doing a tutorial on how to use env flash I'm just telling you the process on how to do this and the reason why I'm not doing a tutorial on how to use env flash is simply because of the fact that you can very easily brick your graphics cards by putting the wrong BIOS on there so for instance when you have like a reference card let's say the Nvidia 2080 ti reference and then you've got the EVGA SC ultra or XC ultra which is based on the same reference PCB but has a custom BIOS on there with different boost clocks and stuff you what a lot people do is they'll take those higher boost clock BIOS and flash them onto their regular vanilla cards the problem is that doesn't always work you'll get subset mismatch you'll get all kinds of device ID mismatches and you've got to override those to say yes I know it's not the same flash it while depending on like back in like the 700 series era there was also different revisions to the actual die itself so you'd have like a1 b1 stuff like that and you could put a wrong BIOS on the wrong revision brick your your graphics card and never get it to come back ask me how I know that oh you know the funny you should ask I actually made a video about it now when we use env link I don't want to have to type in msi gtx 1650 409 6.1 9:02 1:9 Dom so I'm just gonna rename it to don't die dot-com forgot ROM I don't know a website I probably wouldn't go there if I were you just by the sounds of it alright so now with envy flash downloaded and extracted into the same folder as our ROM you can set the file structure however you want you have any flash 64 in MV flash NV flash is for 32-bit no one should be running 32-bit in 2019 for any reason whatsoever and then NV flash 64 for 64-bit operating systems now you used to be older in Windows 10 or Windows 7 like right click and like run command prompt here but you can't do that crap anymore so now you need to go over to your Start menu and do command or come over to that right click run as administrator if you don't have administrator privileges this is not going to work and then don't die romp hey I remember how to do a things crazy okay update display driver firmware yes to confirm any of a key to abort yes what you just heard it do was actually disable the driver which I forgot to do manually but fortunately MV flash will do it for you now it's now writing the EEPROM it's now flashing the image to our latest ROM that we put on there verifying the update firmware image as now just broken your system that's actually somewhat normal because the thing is it's running still off of the previous loaded BIOS until you restart so when I actually flashed the wrong BIOS on my previous graphics card okay it worked and then I restarted the computer and it never came back in fact it was so broken that it the graphics card itself was not even like identifiable to the system in fact we tried everything we possibly could to get that EEPROM to rewrite but it was so broken that even when we would identify graphics cards it just said VGA that was it but it still gave you no picture whatsoever and what we did we did was the old trick of like have two graphics cards in the system at the same time boot off the good one and then envy flash to the second card because you could tell it which card you want to flash to we showed how to do all that we did our tighten our TX BIOS upgrades it just was like no card present so anyway let's now do this let me shut this down and we are going to now put our power or our graphics chord or display port into the bottom one so what died obviously was the port this graphics card is still perfectly fine and if you were one of those people I I didn't see anyone say J you probably just killed the port but if you did type that in the thousands of comments that I can't possibly read through kudos to you well it's still alive which kind of sucks in a way because we wanted to send this thing off where's my blowtorch alright guys thanks for watching at least today we got to show you some of the troubleshooting methods also how to reflash the BIOS and I guess that's what we showed you today so thanks for watching and as always we'll see you in the next one where don't ask me how we managed to overpressurize the system enough to rip a valve in half but let's just say we were experimenting with things and pressures and that happened by the way so if you guys I can't incriminate myself we'll see you in the night\n"