On Thu, 17 Nov 2011 14:58:23 +0200 Svante Olofsson svante@fyraess.com wrote:
Hi,
I tried to flash an A7N8X-VM400 board with the current bios (got it with flashrom -r). The current bios rom was of identical size as the downloaded newer bios rom. I figured it would be safest to try to flash with the old one :)
hello
by "old one" you mean the backed up rom contents i guess? well in newer versions of flashrom this would lead to a complete skipped write because it checks for equal content on the chip before erasing anything ;)
what is more of a problem is the *old* version of flashrom you have used, as you have seen...
The information below is copied from the terminal:
svante@stereo:~$ sudo flashrom -wV current_A7NVM400-ASUS.080009.rom flashrom v0.9.1-r946 […] Flash image seems to be a legacy BIOS. Disabling checks. Writing flash chip... Erasing flash chip... Looking at blockwise erase function 0... trying... 0x000000-0x000fff, ERASE FAILED at 0x00000008! Expected=0xff, Read=0x4c, failed byte count from 0x00000000-0x00000fff: 0xfdc ERASE FAILED!
Looking at blockwise erase function 1... trying... 0x000000-0x00ffff, ERASE FAILED at 0x00000008! Expected=0xff, Read=0x4c, failed byte count from 0x00000000-0x0000ffff: 0xfed5 ERASE FAILED!
Looking at blockwise erase function 2... trying... 0x000000-0x07ffff, ERASE FAILED at 0x00000008! Expected=0xff, Read=0x4c, failed byte count from 0x00000000-0x0007ffff: 0x687be ERASE FAILED!
this looks like a complete write protection, which is quite common... see http://flashrom.org/Board_Enable for details.
what do you think, am I screwed?
not at all, but we will probably need to add some code to enable writing on your board. first of all please get a current version of flashrom from subversion and compile it. http://flashrom.org/Downloads
then verify that the rom content is still the same as the backed up image (e.g. flashrom -v backup.rom). then reply with the logs of the following commands (run as root) attached/embedded: lspci -xxnnvvv flashrom -V if possible also superiotool -deV
you can of course also try to reverse engineer the needed code yourself as described here: http://flashrom.org/Finding_Board_Enable_by_Reverse_Engineering
if you wait for us to do it it can take its time...