E3C224D4I-14S, BIOS 3.20: No boot

[nifoc]

I decided to update the BIOS of my ASRockRack E3C224D4I-14S from 2.00 to 3.20 today, because I'm planning on buying a Broadwell-based CPU soon. I have not bought that CPU yet, I'm still using my Haswell-R-based Intel Core i3-4150.

After the update, everything appeared to work fine. The machine successfully POSTed and I was able to access the updated BIOS.
So it's not like the BIOS update bricked my motherboard completely, because the BIOS is definitely working and I can change settings just fine.

The problems only start when the system tries to boot from an USB stick, because that simply doesn't work. After the BIOS initialisation screen, all I see is a blinking line/dot and it doesn't look like the USB drive is being accessed at all.
What I would expect to see is the GRUB menu that let's me choose which FreeNAS boot environment I want to boot into, but that menu simply doesn't show up. No matter how long I let the system sit at the blinking-dot-screen.

I also tried manually selecting the boot drive, but that didn't work either. The USB stick shows up and I can select it, but it doesn't boot from it.
Another thing I tried were multiple different USB thumb drives, but the system couldn't/wouldn't boot from any of the ones I tested.

It’s (obviously) not a FreeNAS issue either, because I tried SystemRescueCd and FreeDOS, too.

Now, one thing I did notice is that the BIOS 3.20 version has this bizarre note:

Due to BIOS code major upgrade to support Broadwell CPU feature, this BIOS update (P3.xx and after) will be backward compatible to Haswell CPU (E3 v3), but won’t be able to downgrade to P2.xx versions after upgrade to P3.xx BIOS.​

Does this mean that my i3-4150 is not supported by the 3.20 update? The wording seems to suggest that only Broadwell and Haswell E3 CPUs are supported. If the CPU is unsupported, I don't understand why the system is POSTing.

Anyway, since the E3C224D4I-14S is quite popular around here, I was hoping that maybe someone here has any idea about what might be going on.

 

[Ericloewe]

The wording seems to suggest that only Broadwell and Haswell E3 CPUs are supported.

Not really, that's just lazy wording. Supermicro does it too.

I had a heck of a hard time with a BIOS update on my ASRock X99 WS. In the end, I had to downgrade to an old version just to get Windows to boot. They seem to think that might be dangerous in this case (might require some more effort, but shouldn't be impossible), though.

 

[nifoc]

Thanks to your suggestion I tried reflashing the older version, but that didn't work. The "Instant Flash" utility wouldn't let me proceed.

The only version that it would allow me to flash was 3.20, so I basically reflashed the same version I already flashed yesterday ... and for whatever reason, that fixed my problem. The only explanation I have for this is "computers".

 

[Ericloewe]

At least it's fixed. Maybe something was left in an inconsistent state.