I've tested read/write/erase on Dell T410 and it appeared to work fine. I initially did a flashrom -r backup.bin which appeared to work. Then I attempted flashrom and aborted after several minutes with flashrom taking 100% CPU. When I reread the flash, it appeared to have been erased. I then started the write operation again and after some patience it completed successfully.
After talking to carldani, idwer, macavity, and flyback on #flashrom (thanks for the help) I reverted to the original backup since this was a remote machine and someone wasn't on site in case the BIOS wanted some input on reboot
The machine did not reboot and a person was sent to the location to hard powercycle the machine, and it came up and booted fine.
~# flashrom -V flashrom v0.9.1-r946 No coreboot table found. DMI string system-manufacturer: "Dell Inc." DMI string system-product-name: "PowerEdge T410" DMI string system-version: "Not Specified" DMI string baseboard-manufacturer: "Dell Inc." DMI string baseboard-product-name: "0M638F" DMI string baseboard-version: "A04" DMI string chassis-type: "<OUT OF SPEC>" Found chipset "Intel ICH10R", enabling flash write...
... (all the output is in the attached file)
Shaun