Do you know which BIOS you have now? The last one was 213.

No, updating the BIOS has no effect on your recovery partition.

MDeg wrote:
I am factory right now. BIOS 204 I believe. What is the difference between a BIOS and vBIOS?

The BIOS is the firmware that is embedded in you G73. You can examine it by spamming the F2 key when it boots up. The settings in the BIOS are called the CMOS. Whenever you update your BIOS, you may have to reset some of the settings in the CMOS. It is a risky thing to upgrade. Unless you are absolutely sure of what you are doing, you can brick your laptop permanently.

The vBIOS is the firmware for your graphics card. There aren't any settings with it however except what you can set using the AMD graphics driver/software. You should not upgrade the vBIOS unless your System BIOS is at least 211 or higher. Most people recommend 213. The vBIOS is just as risky to upgrade, and you must be absolutely sure to do everything exactly as instructed, or again you will brick your laptop.

Regarding the system BIOS: It is unwise to use the Windows upgrade software provided by Asus. It is far safer to use a bootable USB drive formatted in FAT 32 (NOT NTFS)

If you succeed in upgrading your system BIOS to 213, then you can think about upgrading your vBIOS next.

I would recommend the OD2 vBIOS as the latest and best. It will work with the very latest AMD drivers.

I have selected some helpful directions from this thread


The Safer Method to Flash a System BIOS

1. Format a USB drive to FAT32 format.
2. Download the new BIOS and unzip it to the USB drive.
3. Remove USB drive after you're certain the file transfer is complete.
4. Restart your notebook and while the ASUS logo is on the screen press F2 or del a few times to enter the BIOS setup.
5. Find the Easy Flash Utility and insert the USB drive. Tell Easy flash where your BIOS file is then follow directions explicitely!!!
6. When your notebook restarts, enter the BIOS Setup utility again and select "Load Optimized Defaults" (I think it's f9 )
7. Save and Exit, then continue into Windows.

Directions for upgrading the vBIOS:

Post #1 in this thread
the important consideration with the vBIOS recommended there is that it does NOT support AMD Overdrive (like OD2 does) However, it is the "official" ASUS recommended vBIOS driver. Although I don't know what practical value that has since the G73 is out of warranty, and if your laptop is messed up because of ANY vBIOS update, it will still be repaired at your own expense.

I am using OD2, and it is just a tweaked version of the "official" vBIOS to allow better functioning of the graphics card. For example my card runs 10 degrees centigrade cooler now than it used to. Plus it adds better battery savings features and supports the very latest AMD drivers INCLUDING overdrive (overclocking)

The problem is FINDING that vBIOS any more since it was developed more or less privately by Chastity.

However, I found it here
but be sure to check it for virus etc. before opening. Notice also that the MD5 checksum mentioned a couple of posts later in that same thread IS correct.

Good Luck! 😄

Hmmm usually NTFS formatted USB with BIOS file is not recognized at all as having a BIOS file on it to update?