[flashrom] Last resort?

[Russell Morgan]

Good morning,

I'm thinking about using Flashrom as a last resort to fix my BIOS - it's 
for a laptop which I know you say is absolutely a terrible idea, but 
this looks like the only way I can flash a new BIOS without needing to 
reboot.

Here's a long-winded explanation:

I bought this laptop secondhand, a Lenovo V510-15ikb, knowing it didn't 
quite work. But I didn't realise quite how perplexing it would be.

First, the touchpad and keyboard don't work. The caps lock key lights up 
when it turns on, but then as soon as the Lenovo logo appears, it turns 
off, and the keyboard doesn't respond at all.

So, using a usb keyboard and mouse, I formatted the laptop, and put a 
fresh copy of Windows 10 on it. But then, when it went to restart, it 
just stopped on the blue restart screen. Everything still worked, I 
could move the mouse, and it looked like the hard drive was reading 
something, but four hours later, still no restart. So, I use the power 
button to restart. This leads to a series of problems, where the laptop 
won't consistently boot. But after a few attempts, I can get into Windows.

Now, from inside Windows, everything seems fine, the system loads 
quickly, wifi connects. But when I run windows update, it freezes - the 
system works, but update itself just freezes. When I run Lenovo system 
update, it stops at 97%. Firefox won't load, but Chrome will.  And I 
can't restart the system.  Again, it gets to the blue restart screen, 
the mouse still moves, but it never restarts.  I don't know for sure, 
but it seems like it can't communicate with the motherboard correctly to 
actually restart.

So, I boot into BIOS. There's a newer version available, and from the 
BIOS itself, I can restart the system.  So I boot back into Windows, and 
run Win64 - from part of the Lenovo BIOS update .exe which is supposed 
to flash the BIOS. But to do that, it needs to reboot the system, so it 
tries and it fails.

So, in windows, I try to run Phoenix UEFI Winflash, which tells me 
"Please select the correct BIOS image". I'm using bios.cap from 2WCN42WW 
from here: 
https://pcsupport.lenovo.com/no/en/products/laptops-and-netbooks/lenovo-v-se......

So, I figure maybe I can do it from the command prompt, so I use the 
Windows 10 USB stick and get to the command prompt, run win64.bat, and 
it still needs to reboot. Which doesn't happen. I also try accessing 
UEFI from here, which freezes the system.

So, I figure maybe I can do it from FreeDOS. I make a FreeDOS boot USB, 
run win64.bat and am told the software can't be run from DOS.

So, I use the DOS version, phlash16, and I turn the .cap file into a 
.bin using UEFITool, and phlash16 runs and looks like it's going to 
work... but then I get the message, "platform signature not found in the 
interface."

So, I figure maybe I can do it from Linux. I install Ubuntu using wubi, 
and try to boot into it, but after a hefty amount of time on a black 
screen, I get a bluescreen of death. I try to boot linux from USB, but 
same problem.

I instead install Ubuntu to a USB, and can boot from it - but I see a 
large list of ACPI errors.  I try to flash the bios using fwupdate, but 
it can't seem to communicate with /dev/sda2 which is where my efi is 
supposedly.  Plus, I still can't reboot.

So, I check event viewer from Windows to see what's happening when I'm 
rebooting, and I get this error message:

: The embedded controller (EC) did not respond within the specified 
timeout period. This may indicate that there is an error in the EC 
hardware or firmware or that the BIOS is accessing the EC incorrectly. 
You should check with your computer manufacturer for an upgraded BIOS. 
In some situations, this error may cause the computer to function 
incorrectly.

So I need a solution to update the BIOS without needing to reboot, which 
brings me to you.

Is there anything you can recommend, before I try Flashrom?

Thanks for reading this far and I really look forward to hearing from you,

Russell