Please help me understand.
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When you boot up a computer, the BIOS is the first thing to run — it POSTS the system (Power-On Self-Test; basically making sure the motherboard, RAM and firmware are all functional), and then hands off the rest of the startup to the OS kernel to finish the process.
What that means is that, after it does its job, the BIOS goes dormant. It only runs once, on startup, and won’t run again until the system is restarted. Any updates made to the BIOS prior to a restart won’t ‘take’ until then.
That’s also why you’re advised not to restart your computer during a BIOS update: the process requires that a chip on the motherboard be completely re-written with new firmware (‘flashed’ is the technical term), which is an all-or-nothing procedure that will erase the existing BIOS.
Interrupt that process, and you end up with no BIOS at all and a system that won’t POST.
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