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Re: [flashrom] Update bios (not full flash) with flashrom
by Skoll RC 29 May '18

29 May '18

I have an external programmer and a full backup of my current bios. nothing writen, there was a label but it had to come off with time. How can I concatenate images? The update is not a full bios, is it? ________________________________ De : David Hendricks <david.hendricks(a)gmail.com> Envoyé : mardi 29 mai 2018 19:19 À : Skoll RC Cc : flashrom(a)flashrom.org Objet : Re: [flashrom] Update bios (not full flash) with flashrom On Sun, May 27, 2018 at 11:44 AM, Skoll RC <amisbievre(a)hotmail.fr> wrote: > Hi everyone, > > I would like to update my GA-8I915P-MF's bios with flashrom but Gigabyte > only provide updates and no full bios so when I try to update with > flashrom -p internal -w 8i9pmf.f2 I have an error message: Error: Image size > (262144 B) doesn't match the flash chip's size (524288 B)! > How can I fix it? That's unfortunate. Do you have an external programmer (something like a buspirate) that can be used in case things go wrong? Can you tell if there is anything written to the lower half of the chip? It could be as simple as concatenating the 256KB image to itself to create a 512KB image. But I wouldn't recommend trying that unless you have a good means of recovering.

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Re: [flashrom] Update bios (not full flash) with flashrom
by David Hendricks 29 May '18

29 May '18

On Sun, May 27, 2018 at 11:44 AM, Skoll RC <amisbievre(a)hotmail.fr> wrote: > Hi everyone, > > I would like to update my GA-8I915P-MF's bios with flashrom but Gigabyte > only provide updates and no full bios so when I try to update with > flashrom -p internal -w 8i9pmf.f2 I have an error message: Error: Image size > (262144 B) doesn't match the flash chip's size (524288 B)! > How can I fix it? That's unfortunate. Do you have an external programmer (something like a buspirate) that can be used in case things go wrong? Can you tell if there is anything written to the lower half of the chip? It could be as simple as concatenating the 256KB image to itself to create a 512KB image. But I wouldn't recommend trying that unless you have a good means of recovering.

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Update bios (not full flash) with flashrom
by Skoll RC 27 May '18

27 May '18

Hi everyone, I would like to update my GA-8I915P-MF's bios with flashrom but Gigabyte only provide updates and no full bios so when I try to update with flashrom -p internal -w 8i9pmf.f2 I have an error message: Error: Image size (262144 B) doesn't match the flash chip's size (524288 B)! How can I fix it? thx

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jmicron SATA/IDE flashing of option rom
by Rudolf Marek 27 May '18

27 May '18

Hi, I own JMB363 SATA/IDE. I figured it out how to flash it with a flashrom. It has the parallel flash which is 512KiB (SST39VF040), but the memory BAR where the flash is visible is only 64KiB. How flashrom deals with such programmers? It looks like I just need to mask the address bits not to get out of the BAR. Maybe I need to use "layout" feature? Has someone else the jmicron SATA/IDE controller? I guess we could support similar controllers. Thanks Rudolf

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Re: [flashrom] ITE 8518 flashing through keyboard port
by Curi0 26 May '18

26 May '18

According to the schematic the power lines are shared. How could I check if the EC is powered when accessing the flashing chip ? On Fri, May 25, 2018, 3:02 PM Mike Banon <mikebdp2(a)gmail.com> wrote: > > Directly flashing the SPI chip maybe be dangerous since the EC can > interfere unless the SPI chip is desoldered. > > EC will not interfere if the board will be powered off, and you could > directly flash a SPI chip without desoldering by attaching a test clip > to it (which is connected to a flashrom-supported programmer like a > cheap CH341A). Examples of the instruction: > https://www.flashrom.org/ISP , > http://dangerousprototypes.com/docs/Flashing_a_BIOS_chip_with_Bus_Pirate > (for CH341A its the same, just a connection scheme and flashrom > commands are a little bit different) > > On Fri, May 25, 2018 at 9:06 AM, Curi0 <zkqri0(a)gmail.com> wrote: > > Hi, > > I have a laptop with ITE 8518 and I want to try to port coreboot. The SPI > > flash chip is shared between the EC and BIOS and is connected to the ITE > > 8518. Directly flashing the SPI chip maybe be dangerous since the EC can > > interfere unless the SPI chip is desoldered. > > > > The ITE 8518 has a mode where the keyboard connector can be used a > parallel > > port for flashing > > ( > http://www.recomb-omsk.ru/published/SC/html/scripts/doc/94689_datasheet_IT8… > > similar chip) but there isn't any information on the software required. > This > > video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GYedPOLiUOo) shows flashing the > BIOS > > using a proprietary programmer software so it should be possible. > > > > So is there any way I could reverse engineer the parallel port if I don't > > have access to the ITE flashing software and the programmer in the video > > costs $150 and even if it could be reverse engineered there won't be any > way > > to see the raw parallel port commands it sends.Possibly there are some > > documents floating on the internet with the information. > > > > Curi0 > > > > _______________________________________________ > > flashrom mailing list > > flashrom(a)flashrom.org > > https://mail.coreboot.org/mailman/listinfo/flashrom >

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reading the flash image of my Celsius H265
by Elmar Stellnberger 26 May '18

26 May '18

When I boot with iomem=relaxed and enable flash writing in my BIOS I get the following result with my Celsius H265 notebook: > flashrom -p internal:laptop=force_I_want_a_brick --read celsius2.rom flashrom p1.0-74-g2568357 on Linux 4.17.0-rc3+ (x86_64) flashrom is free software, get the source code at https://flashrom.org Using clock_gettime for delay loops (clk_id: 1, resolution: 1ns). ======================================================================== WARNING! You seem to be running flashrom on an unsupported laptop. Laptops, notebooks and netbooks are difficult to support and we recommend to use the vendor flashing utility. The embedded controller (EC) in these machines often interacts badly with flashing. See the manpage and https://flashrom.org/Laptops for details. If flash is shared with the EC, erase is guaranteed to brick your laptop and write may brick your laptop. Read and probe may irritate your EC and cause fan failure, backlight failure and sudden poweroff. You have been warned. ======================================================================== Proceeding anyway because user forced us to. Found chipset "Intel ICH9M-E". Enabling flash write... OK. Found Winbond flash chip "W25X32" (4096 kB, SPI) mapped at physical address 0x00000000ffc00000. Reading flash... done. However if I execute this twice I get two different images: wget https://www.elstel.org/uploads/celsius.rom wget https://www.elstel.org/uploads/celsius2.rom Using vbindiff I can see that quite a lot is different between both images. - which would be difficult to achieve if the firmware was changed while I am running my computer. The image may be somehow corrupted as me_cleaner (BIOS offers Intel AMT) can not process the image: python ../me_cleaner/me_cleaner.py -S -O celsius-no-me.rom celsius.rom Unknown image See also the dmidecode that I have attached. How can it be that both images are different? Do you think that the images are corrupted? If so what could we do about it?

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Re: [flashrom] ITE 8518 flashing through keyboard port
by awokd 25 May '18

25 May '18

On Fri, May 25, 2018 9:32 am, Mike Banon wrote: >> Directly flashing the SPI chip maybe be dangerous since the EC can >> interfere unless the SPI chip is desoldered. > > EC will not interfere if the board will be powered off, and you could > directly flash a SPI chip without desoldering by attaching a test clip to > it (which is connected to a flashrom-supported programmer like a cheap > CH341A). Examples of the instruction: > https://www.flashrom.org/ISP , > http://dangerousprototypes.com/docs/Flashing_a_BIOS_chip_with_Bus_Pirate > (for CH341A its the same, just a connection scheme and flashrom > commands are a little bit different) FWIW, I had a cheap board without any power isolation and an SPI chip shared between EC and ME, and supplying power to the in-situ chip was enough to power up EC. That blocked me from doing anything useful. It's still on my pile to attempt to desolder some day and try again!

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Technical Advisory / Gigabyte GA-F2A88XM-DS2P, Dual MX25L6406E
by Dieter Miosga 25 May '18

25 May '18

Dear all, receive the terminal output of my action to reflash the Master BIOS chip of the forenamed Motherboard, according to the advice in this output. SYMPTOMS ======= After acquiring a Gigabyte GA-F2A88XM-DS2P from mercadoactual.es, I equipped it with an AMD Athlon X4 845 Carrizo/Excavator and a pair of 4GB DDR3 1600MHz RAM (1.35V) bars together with an older GeForce NVIDIA 512MB graphics card of Chinese production. All did work very well over the Thursday evening, Friday and a weekend and I had the benefit of several kernel compilations for which I recommend this composition of Hardware. After a long session, wherein the OpenSuSE Leap 42.3 and the XUbuntu-17.10.1 installations were updated and I did experiment with the BIOS settings, I encountered the board going on in endless idle reboots after reaching the Gigabyte UEFI BIOS screen, in the next morning after switching the system on again, attempting to compile the x86-64 arch version of the kernel with enabled AVX2 instructions. For all fury and rage, the regular methods of hard resetting the BIOS to the factory defaults showed no effect. Short cutting the CMOS-Reset pin pair showed no effect and then removing the battery with short cutting the contacts without and under voltage, with running ventilator or switched off with power supply on, neither. I passed the board to the local hardware supporter for examination and remedy if possible. During the following days when I did notify the support of mercadoactual and had to support a stressing and time taking communication, I had to notice that an arbitrary administrative intervention on my publications in the github.com site did falsely edit some of the update comments, appearing behind changed sections of the contents. The communication with the mercadoactual stuff was awful and led me to the assumption that they are not authorized resellers who can merge the board into a technical support procedure of Gigabyte. Gigabyte's web support is from Google and Facebook protected and shows no local national settlement address. I did get the board returned to my hands with the unaltered symptom of endless idle looping reboot at UEFI screen and the confirmation of the symptoms, two days before the conceded 14 days of customers devolution end. A call to the Gigabyte support in Hamburg/Germany ended after some authoritative advises, that all were already anticipated by my work prudence, with no further information helping to resolve the problem. RESOLVED ======= With the FLASHROM utility of free and open source software, using a CH341A USB to SPI programmer together with a clip to seize the pins of the master MX25L6406E chip, it was possible to reset the BIOS to a reusable state. Thereafter, the BIOS did not reboot itself in an endless idle loop and the Gigabyte Dual BIOS mechanism did detect a corrupt primary BIOS on the UEFI screen and prompted for to over program the primary from the backup BIOS. After answering yes and awaiting the copy progress to finish, the Motherboard did work alike from the first moments on. I did flash in the regular and for now only one version from Gigabyte support directly from the web pages of gigabyte.com showing the technical descriptions of the GA-F2A88XM-DS2P. It remains unclear whether the FLASHROM utility does respect and handle protected areas sufficiently correct and whether the error messages do mean only the confirmation of a necessary erase to restore the BIOS by interrupting a skip over instead of erase to the sections that are zeroed or oned out. Therefore it is not comprehensible that the second and backup BIOS differs from the first and used one and I do not know what happened if I had answered the question of the DualBIOS mechanism with NO, neither what will happen if the copied BIOS contains the same corrupt sections that led to symptoms described above. URGED ===== It is necessary to forward the fore standing facts not only to the FLASHROM developers but also to Gigabyte support. Who will hook in to Facebook to roll out the necessary remedy? I don't want to. The sold hardware in use is hard to change physically to a mechanism that fully complies with the MX25L6406E BIOS chip design's architectural intentions. The BIOS has to be revised and reprogrammed, shall be edited and should contain at least a feature to seek for a connected FAT32 USB memory stick containing an original BIOS binary file, After a certain number of boot attempts to a defined boot procedure level, that binary should be reflashed to the primary BIOS chip. The technical supporter and I did encounter a restriction in the BIOS that does prohibit the use of older Radeon graphic cards. This should be alleviated. Further, it is necessary to raise the evidence level by the quality and amount of documentation to the FLASHROM utility. 'And now they stand no more to cheat on others, but ask each other "How up!" ' Greetings Dieter Miosga https://github.com/yainit/

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Re: [flashrom] ITE 8518 flashing through keyboard port
by Mike Banon 25 May '18

25 May '18

> Directly flashing the SPI chip maybe be dangerous since the EC can interfere unless the SPI chip is desoldered. EC will not interfere if the board will be powered off, and you could directly flash a SPI chip without desoldering by attaching a test clip to it (which is connected to a flashrom-supported programmer like a cheap CH341A). Examples of the instruction: https://www.flashrom.org/ISP , http://dangerousprototypes.com/docs/Flashing_a_BIOS_chip_with_Bus_Pirate (for CH341A its the same, just a connection scheme and flashrom commands are a little bit different) On Fri, May 25, 2018 at 9:06 AM, Curi0 <zkqri0(a)gmail.com> wrote: > Hi, > I have a laptop with ITE 8518 and I want to try to port coreboot. The SPI > flash chip is shared between the EC and BIOS and is connected to the ITE > 8518. Directly flashing the SPI chip maybe be dangerous since the EC can > interfere unless the SPI chip is desoldered. > > The ITE 8518 has a mode where the keyboard connector can be used a parallel > port for flashing > (http://www.recomb-omsk.ru/published/SC/html/scripts/doc/94689_datasheet_IT8… > similar chip) but there isn't any information on the software required. This > video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GYedPOLiUOo) shows flashing the BIOS > using a proprietary programmer software so it should be possible. > > So is there any way I could reverse engineer the parallel port if I don't > have access to the ITE flashing software and the programmer in the video > costs $150 and even if it could be reverse engineered there won't be any way > to see the raw parallel port commands it sends.Possibly there are some > documents floating on the internet with the information. > > Curi0 > > _______________________________________________ > flashrom mailing list > flashrom(a)flashrom.org > https://mail.coreboot.org/mailman/listinfo/flashrom

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ITE 8518 flashing through keyboard port
by Curi0 25 May '18

25 May '18

Hi, I have a laptop with ITE 8518 and I want to try to port coreboot. The SPI flash chip is shared between the EC and BIOS and is connected to the ITE 8518. Directly flashing the SPI chip maybe be dangerous since the EC can interfere unless the SPI chip is desoldered. The ITE 8518 has a mode where the keyboard connector can be used a parallel port for flashing ( http://www.recomb-omsk.ru/published/SC/html/scripts/doc/94689_datasheet_IT8… similar chip) but there isn't any information on the software required. This video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GYedPOLiUOo) shows flashing the BIOS using a proprietary programmer software so it should be possible. So is there any way I could reverse engineer the parallel port if I don't have access to the ITE flashing software and the programmer in the video costs $150 and even if it could be reverse engineered there won't be any way to see the raw parallel port commands it sends.Possibly there are some documents floating on the internet with the information. Curi0

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