alt Hacker NewsI also managed to brick a motherboard, though mine was a Supermicro, by missing a line in the README that tells you to move some hardware jumpers on the board before applying the flash. I found one jumper, but the other one was in another corner of the board, and the README says "if you have both, move both", so I thought I just had a board with only one jumper.
Notably, the flash process itself does not check for the positions of the jumpers and exit, or anything like that, it just proceeds merrily along, and renders the board unbootable. I've been around with Flashrom a dozen times and can't figure out the right sequence of flash-this-rerun-that to recover the thing. (It's an X9DR3, if anyone here has hints.)
So I wish I could be mad at Framework, but only the tiniest bit. It's sadly common.
My understanding is that you can usually flash the BIOS from the BMC even if the BIOS is fucked, though it's a paid feature upgrade (though I think someone might have cracked the algorithm on older boards).
At least, it has been the case on several boards of mine, including an X10SDV which bricked itself, as far as I can tell, just from bad luck somehow.