Stefan,

Thanks for your quick response. I did a little more work, and it looks like I needed to power the mainboard w/ the ac adapter to power the chip and disconnect vcc from bus pirate from pin 8. Then I enabled bus pirate's internal pullup resistors by connecting vcc to vpu.

So this works now:

C:\flashrom>flashrom -p buspirate_spi:dev=com3,pullups=on,spispeed=8M
flashrom v0.9.6.1-r1704 on Windows 5.1 (x86)
flashrom is free software, get the source code at http://www.flashrom.org

Calibrating delay loop... OK.
Found Macronix flash chip "MX25L3205(A)" (4096 kB, SPI) on buspirate_spi.
Found Macronix flash chip "MX25L3205D/MX25L3208D" (4096 kB, SPI) on buspirate_spi.
Found Macronix flash chip "MX25L3206E" (4096 kB, SPI) on buspirate_spi.
Multiple flash chip definitions match the detected chip(s): "MX25L3205(A)", "MX25L3205D/MX25L3208D", "MX25L3206E"
Please specify which chip definition to use with the -c <chipname> option.

Thanks to everyone who works on flashrom, hopefully now I will be able to recover my bricked laptop by flashing a new bios.

Regards,

Matt

On 2/22/2014 8:26 AM, Stefan Tauner wrote:

Hi,

most probably a connection problem. See also
http://flashrom.org/ISP
and
http://flashrom.org/Bus_Pirate