Hi!
Thought to ask you guys about this.
My friend was building his PC and he had completed it, but he had to flash bios to motherboard and this ended in catastrophe because of bad instructions the motherboard is now a paperweight.
This made me wonder that is there any way to rescue motherboard when this happens? My knowledge is that this is beyond help, but what do you guys think? Is there any way to undo this?
Some motherboards have a backup bios that can be restored. I’ve never had one so I don’t know exactly how it works.
On my motherboard I can roll back to a previous version but heard that can brick a motherboard as well. 
If the motherboard has a flashback option, yes. If not, only method would be to send it back to the store/manufacturer for repair and hope you don’t pay for the damage.
I rescued a MB once by flashing it externally, search the internet for “pc bios eeprom flasher”. But it depends if it is worth the effort, because you need additional hardware and have to do some research how to use it. I would only recommend if you have tried everything else and you’re sure the MB is a zero-value/total loss otherwise.
If you have a good PC hardware repair shop they should be able to do it too.
I was just going to give you or your friend a gigantic hail mary of a salvage attempt–popping battery out (or replacing it) then putting it back in.
I’ve seen stranger…
PS–I’m all into salvage. If I absolutely wanted to declare it dead without any shadow of a doubt I would A) get out my ohmeter (volt meter) and 2) find somebody on youtube to tell me what setting I should be on, and where to put the leads to confirm death of board. that way you would absolutely know.
My friend claimed, that this particular motherboard did not have battery, which I find odd. I thought that it was always included. 
He may not know what he is looking for. Now a days, in order to save some motherboard real estate, some manufacturers are using a RT Clock battery that looks like this.
Then they often use double sided tape to attach the heat shrink covered battery on the back side of the ethernet lan connector.
Your friend might have been looking for something like this:
Pudge
Thanks! 
I’ll give him heads up in case he really hasn’t made it a paperweight, or as we say in Finland “made fishing net weight” from it. 
wowsers never heard of hiding a battery on purpose. engineering decision, I see 
For a lot of years now, I have been using mini ITX motherboards for x86_64 and even smaller Motherboards for ARM. Real estate is at a premium on these small boards, which is not good for my clumsy fingers. 
Pudge
@Dinomonster
Some motherboards can be recovered using different methods. Depends on the manufacturer.
As @ricklinux said, it depends on the manufacturer. Some boards come with another backup BIOS or dual BIOS system that will restore the main in case of an issue. But sometimes, some boards need a jumper configuration to trigger the recovery. Some require a specific boot USB or a firmware flasher.
But compared to the older days the new BIOS flashing systems are easier and faster. I wonder how your friend managed to brick the board.
Apparently instructions that came with board were hard to understand and contradicted. I’m not certain if they were provided in English or in Finnish but they were really confusing.
Here’s what they said according my friend (translated from Finnish):
“Press bios flashback button and led begins to flash. After led stops flashing, if led doesn’t give light then update doesn’t work. Accordingly if led gives light, update doesn’t work right”.
What kind of motherboard is that ?
If you would tell us what MB this is, we could come up with some suggestions. Please ask your friend.
Otherwise, it’s a wild goose chase. Fixes range from just removing the battery (there is one) to unsoldering the BIOS chips.
I’m sorry this is so vague guys. 
I don’t know the model of the board, tried asking it, but he has this surgery coming and was not in the mood to talk about the subject.
That’s why I asked generally about the subject, because it interests me in general. Thanks for the tips you have given! 
Sounds like it’s a fairly newer motherboard if it has a flashback button. Most newer boards can be flashed from within the UEFI settings (Bios). Some boards have a dedicated usb slot but i never use those, I just stick the usb in a slot and go into the UEFI Bios settings if it has flash capability and run from there. I have never ever had a bad bios flash since the early nineties and i have done many many updates to Bios and or UEFI firmware as it’s called now.
Edit: There are only a few ways in which you could have a bad flash. If you lose power during the flash process or interrupt the flash process by not waiting until it’s finished and shutdown or reboot the computer or the flash file is corrupted or the wrong file possibly or bad download of said.
Modern boards refuse the wrong file. They are foolproof in regards to that.
Source: A fool who mixed up board names.
I wouldn’t know about that. I don’t download the wrong files. One needs to know their hardware … and know it well!
