CH341A are really overpriced at Newegg: you can get it from AliExpress China for less than 2 dollars + free shipping, if this project isn't urgent and you could wait about 1 month for it to arrive. From the posts online it seems that CH341A with a green PCB is preferable - less likely to have a hardware design bug causing it to output 5V instead of 3.3V: I heard that some black PCB ones suffer from it (although possible to fix with some soldering).
The desktop boards used to have a DIP8 "shape" BIOS chip plugged into a socket, from where you could easily remove it using a PLCC clip. Sometimes they have a soldered SOIC-8 "shape" chip like many laptops, but its' bearable since there are good SOIC-8 test clips available, using which you can connect to SOIC-8 BIOS chip without soldering and do the ISP (In-System Programming). However, in your case - your board seems to have a WSON-8 "shape" chip, which really sucks as there are no (good/cheap) test clip adapters last time I checked. But at least there's a MSI JSPI1 header near this chip, so maybe you can use it for flashing. Read more about it at flashrom wiki and elsewhere. So, you may also need some 1.27mm 1P male - female or female-female cables to connect a CH341A to this header (10 cm length is recommended, although you can get longer cables and manually resolder them if it turns out that a flashing operation isn't reliable). Additionally, USB extension cable of ~1m length will make all this more convenient. And you'll use another PC with some Linux loaded (either from HDD or LiveUSB) and flashrom, to read from and write to a BIOS chip of this motherboard.
Thank you for providing a lspci file, although I'm not skilled enough to tell what exactly caused a flashrom's internal mode to fail - maybe someone else can help you.
ср, 16 сент. 2020 г. в 22:59, Clay Daniels clay.daniels.jr@gmail.com:
On Wed, Sep 16, 2020 at 11:43 AM Ivan Ivanov qmastery16@gmail.com wrote:
While doing the internal flashrom operations, that BIOS chip is situated behind a southbridge that you find by AMD FP4 name. Looks like either its' support isn't good enough at flashrom or UEFI firmware / EC controller somehow disturb the operation. Maybe try to access a BIOS chip directly with the external programmer like usb ch341a?
Ivan, thanks for the useful info. Your explanation likely tells me why I can't see my bios chip. I just looked and the little usb devices are available from Newegg where I got the parts to build my Ryzen 7 machine. Before I order one, do you or anyone else on the list have suggestions on what to look for in a usb ch341a external programmer? Newegg has a wide variety.
You may have noticed my https://paste.flashrom.org/ lspci file. I added a Ubuntu Linux disk as FreeBSD doesn't do lspci, just pciconf. I also tried (twice) to load a pciconf -lvb from FreeBSD, which is there but called lspci ;-(
Anyway, thanks for your help, Clay
ср, 9 сент. 2020 г. в 10:52, Clay Daniels clay.daniels.jr@gmail.com:
I'm just trying to read what bios info I can:
MSI X570-A PRO (MS-7C37) AMD Ryzen 7 3700X FreeBSD fbsd13 13.0-CURRENT FreeBSD 13.0-CURRENT
root@fbsd13:~ # flashrom -p internal flashrom v1.2 on FreeBSD 13.0-CURRENT (amd64) flashrom is free software, get the source code at https://flashrom.org
Using clock_gettime for delay loops (clk_id: 4, resolution: 1ns). Found chipset "AMD FP4". Enabling flash write... FCH device found but SMBus revision 0x61 does not match known values. Please report this to flashrom@flashrom.org and include this log and the output of lspci -nnvx, thanks!. Could not determine chipset generation.PROBLEMS, continuing anyway No EEPROM/flash device found. Note: flashrom can never write if the flash chip isn't found automatically.
pciconf -lvb output attached, as well as flashrom -V -p internal (the verbose version)
My first question is: It looks to me that "AMD FP4" is just a BGA (FP4) Socket, not a chip. Newbie to flashrom & coreboot.
Thanks, Clay
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