Hello Kamil,
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On 10.05.2018 11:33, Jan Zuber wrote:
yesterday I wanted to flash the bios on my t500 with libreboot and it did not work. In the picture you see the error message.
Which was:
Verifying flash... FAILED at 0x00003401! Expected=0x5f, Found=0x6e, failed byte count from 0x00000000-0x007fffff: 0x179 Your flash chip is in an unknown state.
Also, it's hard to say what is going on as you didn't even tell us the command you used. All I can see is that you are using a Raspberry Pi for external flashing.
I tried to play the oroginal rom again but then the same mistake was shown.
That address (0x3401) might be used by the ME (a micro controller embed- ded into the chipset). And the ME can cause corruption while it's still active. You might have woken it up by applying power (even if you just connected VCC to the flash chip; it's connected through the board to the chipset).
So the BIOS can share the flash chip with the ME, it is partitioned and I suspect libreboot also messes with the partitioning. If you have a valid backup of the original flash contents: flashrom is accompanied by a tool called `ich_descriptors_tool` it can tell you a lot about the firmware configuration and partitioning.
I don't know what libreboot puts at that address. Generally it's a bad idea to flash the ME region and libreboot in one go.
Can you help with please?
I would try again to see if the "failed byte count" gets lower, and if, try again until it's 0. If that doesn't help, you can try to remove all power from the mainboard, wait some minutes or an hour and try again. Maybe the ME calms down.
I could also be very wrong and this might not be about the ME at all in case your hardware setup is unreliable. Did you validate your backup with some verification runs (i.e. tried to read multiple times to make sure that reading works?
Nico
Best Regards
Kamil