ron minnich rminnich@gmail.com writes:
We really need to start warning people when the flash a thinkpad that it is very important to save the old flash image.
It is somewhat thinkpad specific whether the bios extracted from the update tool will work. On X60 I have had no success with it.
On X200 it sort of works to flash the vendor bios extracted from update .exe. You can even just flash bios region and leave ifd, gbe (and me) alone. (Though I have had it not being able to boot and complain about some pxe stuff)
Note: on x200 there exists a modified (whitelist removed) bios which does not write protect its bootblock. With this it is possible to flash the vendor bios without having to rely on an external programmer to re-flash coreboot.
Backup are essential!
Hello, just a few observations from me, since a have a few T400 motherboards (in various states): Once, before having raspberry "programmer" I've just exchange flash chips between 2 motherboards, by de-soldering and re-soldering them - it worked. There are also flash chips with original T400 bios on sale - what about this? Lenovo is known for problems with bios updates (check: "T400/T500 slow boot after bios update" in google), so I suppose these chips might be useful. The problem that comes to my mind is MAC address that is stored in flash - we know how to change it with coreboot, but I'm not sure if on original bios also. If the MAC is stored in the same place in coreboot and bios then it would be possible to change it.
Peter: Is that really the case with old T400? The MAC might be a problem, but what else? Maybe there are some things that I'm aware off, and while motherboard looks ok in reality it is not.
Since all methods are rather complicated (and I don't have original bios anyway), maybe the easiest would be to read flash chip with original bios (from any unused mainboard) then just flash it to the "right one", then follow with normal windows bios update - what do You think? Michael Widlok
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Arthur Heymans -
Michal Widlok