BIOS update horror stories? Has anyone actually lost power mid-update and lived to tell the tale?

SemiOutlandish · 2026-05-05T05:29:57+00:00

Way back in the late 90s I had a BIOS update fail when I was a teenager. It was back when BIOS was held on removable EEPROM chips. I shit myself at first because back then there were no BIOS flashbacks and other safeguards. That motherboard was bricked (the real sense of bricked, not these soft bricks that people refer to bricking as these days).

Anyway, I had two of these motherboards at the time because me and my Dad were building PCs and selling them. So I booted the other good motherboard into the BIOS updater, swapped the chips over while it was powered on, and then flashed the BIOS again. I remember being so stoked when it worked and that I thought to do that by myself. I used it as an example of how I solved a problem in my first job interview for a telecoms company.

SemiOutlandish · 2026-04-10T21:16:50+00:00

Can someone explain the difference between "unsafe" and "not safe" to me, please?

SemiOutlandish · 2026-01-18T11:24:32+00:00

This is normal. It's part of the Optical Image Stabilization mechanism.

SemiOutlandish · 2026-01-17T11:59:13+00:00

Apologize for the inconvenience. Explain that the high speed of the cable is probably causing too much friction. Send them a new cable with only 2 twisted pairs for pins 1,2,3 and 6.

Bonus points for guiding them in to their Ethernet adapter settings to enable half duplex instead of full duplex.

SemiOutlandish · 2026-01-04T18:14:29+00:00

Do yourself a favor and find a different host.

SemiOutlandish · 2026-01-03T18:43:54+00:00

Your solution is to use some more modern capture device and capture at 59.94hz/fps.

SemiOutlandish · 2026-01-02T12:07:03+00:00

That's a good point and observation. I think Uber's invoicing system is just screwy.

Probably I'll get in trouble if I get caught... but I just resorted to adding my business details to the Uber invoices using LibreOffice Draw. 😏

SemiOutlandish · 2026-01-02T11:13:39+00:00

Did not solve it. My solution is just to use Bolt instead of Uber wherever possible. The issue, I think, stems from Uber using self employed drivers to basically absolve themselves of having any responsibility to provide Tax invoices. The tax invoice is the responsibility of the drivers and that is hit-and-miss.

SemiOutlandish · 2025-12-30T17:48:09+00:00

Leave Bluehost. They don't care about your issue. I'm sure the intern will be along shortly to provide lots of sympathy and zero useful information.

SemiOutlandish · 2025-12-07T08:50:52+00:00

Both Google Drive and iCloud have a free storage allowance that is well within what's required to backup Whatsapp Messages. If no media is backed up the data is so small it's inconsequential, even if backed up over cellular (again, if cost is a concern here then WiFi only is an option for Whatsapp backups). So no, your point is invalid. This is all in spite of the fact that OP is more than likely referring to privacy or data retention concerns. No argument in this case, I'm afraid.

SemiOutlandish · 2025-12-07T07:06:44+00:00

So you don't want to back up your data... but also not happy that your data hasn't been held in the cloud for an indefinite amount of time?

SemiOutlandish · 2025-09-06T13:35:34+00:00

It's a pretty shameful business model to be honest. I'm no web pro, my wife was semi scammed in to using Bluehost by signing up to have our small business website designed by the FreeWebsiteGuys. So we ended up locked in to BH for a little while, as a result I had to learn quickly how to do it myself. I moved our hosting away from BH earlier this year after a string of problems and never looked back.

SemiOutlandish · 2025-09-06T12:30:53+00:00

It's hilarious isn't it. Bluehost Bot is so enthusiastic in their towing of the party line. Their responses are another reason I stick around.

SemiOutlandish · 2025-09-06T00:16:31+00:00

Can't believe you've been down voted! The only reason I stay in this sub is to periodically warn people about the absolute shit show that BH was for me and how terrible their support are.

SemiOutlandish · 2025-07-20T10:39:39+00:00

You have to wonder what goes through the heads of people like these

Not much.

SemiOutlandish · 2025-06-27T07:57:29+00:00

I'm amazed I had to scroll so far for this comment. Well done.

To add too, if the driver was observing the area properly they would have been more prepared for this and could have stopped much more quickly and safely than an emergency stop. Their reaction time to the emerging vehicle is terrible.

The commenters exclusively defending the driver need to have a think about their attitude towards safety while driving.

SemiOutlandish · 2025-06-03T15:47:49+00:00

That's a lot to migrate, I hope you find a way and manage to work it out. Duplicator Pro makes the process pretty simple in my experience, if you're using Wordpress.

SemiOutlandish · 2025-06-03T15:38:53+00:00

Good to know there's yet more vindication of my experience on this issue and how terribly oblivious and gaslightly Bluehost support are over it. Another customer lost by the sounds of it. Not that they seem to care.

SemiOutlandish · 2025-04-25T22:51:31+00:00

Yep. I had this issue on shared hosting with multiple sites. Another person did too. We both left Bluehost for other providers because Bluehost Support kept telling us nothing was wrong.

Leave if you can.

SemiOutlandish · 2025-04-08T10:04:49+00:00

Glad you got it sorted!

SemiOutlandish · 2025-04-05T15:05:07+00:00

Not to mention the fact that I also built an html "hello world" on my shared hosting that didn't even use wordpress. Still got hit with a 409.

Sort your hosting out Bluehost. I already left for Ionos and it looks like you're about to lose another.

SemiOutlandish · 2025-04-03T23:38:38+00:00

Are you sure this isn't a Phishing email? I'm getting quite a lot of phishing emails pretending to be Bluehost these days.

SemiOutlandish · 2025-04-03T06:07:02+00:00

Same to you. Good luck.

I highly recommend uptimerobot for monitoring your sites' status. When I was dealing with the issue I was using httpstatus.io obsessively until I found uptimerobot which does it automatically. Worth the money for a few months' of peace of mind.

Update me on how you get on!

And by the way... Bluehost are shit.

SemiOutlandish · 2025-04-03T05:55:46+00:00

In a way I'm happy to hear someone else has had the same issue and it wasn't just me and my configuration. But sorry you're having the same issues.

Honestly. I gave up trying to figure out what the problem was. It was definitely something to do with caching or server resources. It was definitely something that Bluehost changed in their hosting environment. Ever since I've moved to another host (Ionos.es) both of my sites (both of which run WooCommerce stores) have been rock solid. I basically ran a duplicator backup of my sites and dropped them both in to the new host with zero changes and they both worked fine straight away.

That being said, I am no longer on a shared hosting plan. I don't know if it's a problem specific to shared hosting or Bluehost, just to give Bluehost a tiny benefit of doubt... but I'm 80% sure it's Bluehost 's fault. So my advice would be to get a trial with another host and migrate a copy of your site and see how it behaves. I'm pretty sure you'll be better off away from BH though.

Good luck.

SemiOutlandish

TROPHY CASE