Bricked by a BIOS update, a Framework owner reflashes the chip for $20

A Framework Laptop 13 owner’s AMD Ryzen 7040-series machine was bricked by the company’s BIOS 3.20 update, which shipped security patches for several CVEs alongside feature changes. The flash hung mid-process and left the system rendering garbage from memory. Framework support offered only the usual battery-drain reset, and once that failed, told the owner that with the one-year warranty expired his only option was a replacement motherboard costing CA$500 or more.

The catch is that this was not an isolated failure. Framework’s own forums show repeated BIOS-flash bricking on this model going back to at least March 2025, including for in-warranty users, with no public acknowledgment or confirmed fix from the company. That turns a $500 board swap into a gamble, since the next BIOS update could brick the replacement just as easily. Rather than pay, the author bought a cheap SPI flash programmer and roughly $20 of tools, extracted a clean BIOS image, wired up the onboard flash chip directly, and reprogrammed it himself.

The story lands as a pointed test of Framework’s right-to-repair pitch: the fix was ultimately doable on the bench because the hardware is accessible, but the company itself steered a paying customer toward an expensive replacement instead of a low-cost repair. It’s a useful, detailed walkthrough for anyone facing a failed firmware flash, and a caution against installing vendor BIOS updates the moment they appear.