IBM T30: UNTESTED though READ seems to work.

[Chet Johnson]

I'm going to be slow about this as I don't want to brick my very useful
notebook, but the bios read seemed to work successfully. Here is the
output from the read operation. This is an old IBM T30 and it pretty
much does everything I need as it stands. It does need an upgraded bios
to accommodate some updated wifi features.

I'm really concerned about performing the write operation.

<------------>
#sudo flashrom -r original.rom
[sudo] password for <name>
Calibrating delay loop... OK.
No coreboot table found.
Found chipset "Intel ICH3-M", enabling flash write... OK.
Found chip "ST M50FW080" (1024 KB) at physical address 0xfff00000.
===
This flash part has status UNTESTED for operations: PROBE READ ERASE
WRITE Please email a report to [e-mail] if any of the above
operations work correctly for you with this flash part. Please include
the full output from the program, including chipset found. Thank you for
your help!
===
Reading flash... done.
<------------->

This created the following file
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1048576 2009-07-16 12:52 original.rom

More when I ramp up my bravery (foolishness).

Chet

[Carl-Daniel Hailfinger]

Hi Chet,

thanks for your report. I noticed that you're using a pretty old version
of flashrom. Newer versions of flashrom have marked this chip as
confirmed working. However, there's a big catch. See below for details.

On 16.07.2009 22:02, Chet Johnson wrote:
> I'm going to be slow about this as I don't want to brick my very useful
> notebook, but the bios read seemed to work successfully. Here is the
> output from the read operation. This is an old IBM T30 and it pretty
> much does everything I need as it stands. It does need an upgraded bios
> to accommodate some updated wifi features.

Please don't use flashrom on any laptop. The interaction with the
embedded controller on a laptop can cause a failed flash, bricking your
laptop. The only way to recover would be a repair center or desoldering
the flash chip and flashing the image from another identical model.

We'd warn flashrom users about this, but there is no reliable way to
detect whether a given machine is a laptop or not.

Regards,
Carl-Daniel