Having just gone through a BIOS update the hard way I'm putting this checklist down for future reference. Everything ended up fine but it the entire proceses was much harder than it needed to be. The big takeaway here: backup everything you cannot live without.
My setup is nothing particularly exotic, you can see the notes below for details about the hardware. I'm using an Ivy Bridge motherboard with UEFI BIOS. My boot drive is an SSD and I have three drives together in a RAID 5. I'm using Windows 8 Pro for my OS.
Here's the general checklist. It's not very specific as the details may vary based on your particular configuration. I'm also not an expert on this so YMMV.
- Get latest BIOS.
- If possible, back up your BIOS configuration. Just in case.
- Close all running applications.
- Apply BIOS update.