Request UEFI setting restore after update

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   Hi, here is my post.

Topic: Making easier to preserve BIOS settings during upgrade.
Body: For me the biggest pain when upgrading BIOS is to manually reapply the settings that I changed before - IOW, non default ones. Or better, the biggest pain is to list them all. Sure, there aren't many but nevertheless.
So, I understand it might be tricky for the upgrade process to re-apply those and that's fine. However, please give as at least a feature that would output all the non default ones to a file or at least to a screen. That way it'd be much easier to reapply them. Or such a feature already exist?

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MihaMarkic Members Profile Send Private Message Find Members Posts Add to Buddy List Newbie Joined: 10 Nov 2025 Location: Slovenia Status: Offline Points: 90	Post Options Post Reply Quote MihaMarkic Report Post Thanks(0) Quote Reply Topic: Request UEFI setting restore after update Posted: 21 hours 19 minutes ago at 1:07am
	Hi, here is my post. Topic: Making easier to preserve BIOS settings during upgrade. Body: For me the biggest pain when upgrading BIOS is to manually reapply the settings that I changed before - IOW, non default ones. Or better, the biggest pain is to list them all. Sure, there aren't many but nevertheless. So, I understand it might be tricky for the upgrade process to re-apply those and that's fine. However, please give as at least a feature that would output all the non default ones to a file or at least to a screen. That way it'd be much easier to reapply them. Or such a feature already exist?

Xaltar Members Profile Send Private Message Find Members Posts Add to Buddy List Moderator Group Joined: 16 May 2015 Location: Europe Status: Offline Points: 30943	Post Options Post Reply Quote Xaltar Report Post Thanks(0) Quote Reply Posted: 18 hours 6 minutes ago at 4:20am
	The issue has been discussed here before and ASRock has probably had requests like this many many times. It used to be possible in the days of the actual "BIOS" but UEFI is infinitely more complex and intricate. From what I understand it is all but impossible to "reload" settings from a previous UEFI version after an update. The key issue is that motherboard manufacturers are not responsible for the core of the UEFI, that comes from Intel and AMD. Each manufacturer adds a level of customization to the UEFI but it is mostly just surface level tweaks like hiding or exposing settings, voltage limit changes etc. I am pretty sure this will never happen given the function would break every time there is a new core UEFI update from AMD/intel (AGESA etc).


MihaMarkic Members Profile Send Private Message Find Members Posts Add to Buddy List Newbie Joined: 10 Nov 2025 Location: Slovenia Status: Offline Points: 90	Post Options Post Reply Quote MihaMarkic Report Post Thanks(0) Quote Reply Posted: 7 hours 6 minutes ago at 3:20pm
	Hey, so this feature would be more in an AMD domain then, fair enough. About the difficulty - from my perspective (as a developer), the settings are a dictionary of key-value pairs. Of course values can be nested. I don't see a big deal of saving this dictionary to an XML text file with all the values and with attributes specifying when a value is a non default. This step seems trivial to me and it'd solve 90% for me. Once you have the settings in this format, there could be an option to reapply the non-default ones and a warning during process if the affected property has changed somehow. Honestly, I don't see this a big issue as well. At the end of the day it'd be the same as if user manually applied old non-default values, just in more automated way.

Xaltar Members Profile Send Private Message Find Members Posts Add to Buddy List Moderator Group Joined: 16 May 2015 Location: Europe Status: Offline Points: 30943	Post Options Post Reply Quote Xaltar Report Post Thanks(0) Quote Reply Posted: 6 hours 33 minutes ago at 3:53pm
	That is the issue, many of the settings are not simply value=on/off etc. They have dependencies and these can be completely different from one version to the next. Can it be done? Probably, but the amount of effort that would be required to ensure a smooth import with every single new version would be non viable. You need to understand that the enemy of any tech manufacturer is instability. Complexity is absolutely not something you want to introduce. If even 1 in 1000 users were to experience a catastrophic failure due to a mistake implementing loading saved settings that could be thousands of support hours wasted over 100k boards. It is easy to see solutions to things we would like when we only consider ourselves but once you start to factor in the labor, potential for mistakes and subsequent support labor needed to address the issue it becomes clear why manufacturers prefer to keep things simple rather than add complexity and points of failure. Also there is the issue that implementing a feature like this has no benefit to the manufacturer. They will get nothing for the labor and time spent developing it. Perhaps as a selling point for a new product line it may have some viability but if there is even a single bad review on youtube about the feature that value is gone too. As I said, this discussion has been had here before. I don't disagree that it would be a nice feature to have, it's just not a practical one I can see any manufacturer wasting time and resources on.


MihaMarkic Members Profile Send Private Message Find Members Posts Add to Buddy List Newbie Joined: 10 Nov 2025 Location: Slovenia Status: Offline Points: 90	Post Options Post Reply Quote MihaMarkic Report Post Thanks(0) Quote Reply Posted: 6 hours 15 minutes ago at 4:11pm
	As I said, even the export to a file would help a lot. And this step isn't really problematic nor difficult IMO. So what now, back to taking photos of screens of various settings before doing the upgrade, I guess.

Xaltar Members Profile Send Private Message Find Members Posts Add to Buddy List Moderator Group Joined: 16 May 2015 Location: Europe Status: Offline Points: 30943	Post Options Post Reply Quote Xaltar Report Post Thanks(0) Quote Reply Posted: 6 hours 7 minutes ago at 4:19pm
	I am just a moderator here, I don't speak for ASRock I do know there used to be an export/import function in the UEFI but that was a long time ago now and you couldn't import settings from a previous version.


MihaMarkic Members Profile Send Private Message Find Members Posts Add to Buddy List Newbie Joined: 10 Nov 2025 Location: Slovenia Status: Offline Points: 90	Post Options Post Reply Quote MihaMarkic Report Post Thanks(0) Quote Reply Posted: 5 hours 33 minutes ago at 4:53pm
	Hey, I'm not expecting you to implement it, though I wouldn't mind - just discussing. Indeed, there is already a feature that would dump your settings to a file, the problem is that that file isn't human readable (or is it?) any only useful within same BIOS version. If that file was human readable, that would do for me those 90%. Now that I think about it, I wonder whether there are any specs about that file for one to extract relevant data.