Hi, I just did a backup of the BIOS chip of a new laptop I got. in case something happened to be able to restore it all to sane defaults.
Freshly built Flashrom snapshot on a live Arch (Manjaro) environment, the chip is an XM25QH256C[XIQ] in a WSON8 package (6x8), I didn't want to desolder the chip and I noticed some exposed solder where the contacts would be so I did the dump using a pogo pin contraption attached to the CH341a. It is an old programmer I've had for years (I don't think there's any cheap-ish alternative using at least USB 2.0 that is supported by Flashrom, so... it was slow), both Vcc and the data lines ran at 3.3-ish volts.
After the message that appeared during the read I thought "damn, I didn't enable verbose output nor was I logging the operation", so I did a verify operation afterwards which is essentially the same. Log is attached and if you need the contents of the ROM I can attach them too (32MiB).
I didn't do much in-depth analysis of the ROM but it seems correct, at least I can see UEFI and ME structures in there.
Sadly, I don't plan on writing to that chip anytime soon, at least not until I get a replacement because the setup is not very stable and I don't want to risk the connection getting interrupted. These XMC chips are hard to come by in my area, but Mouser sells an equivalent Winbond that is also supported and is greenlit to be used in this laptop; so I had ordered one of those to have at hand.
Anyway, I digress haha, you have the Verify log attached to this email (I thought there'd be more data there).
Regards, James.
PS. I think it's not implemented, but perhaps adding a progress indicator (since the flash chip's size is known) to read/write operations would be handy, if it weren't for an indicator LED on my programmer board I wouldn't really know if it was progressing or not.
Hi James,
thank you for the report!
I've created a patch which marks the chip as successfully probed and read [0].
We've have a somewhat working progress indicator with `--progress`, but it needs a big overhaul to work proper.
-- Thomas
[0] https://review.coreboot.org/c/flashrom/+/73362
On Fri, 2023-02-24 at 18:07 +0100, James Russell wrote:
Hi, I just did a backup of the BIOS chip of a new laptop I got. in case something happened to be able to restore it all to sane defaults.
Freshly built Flashrom snapshot on a live Arch (Manjaro) environment, the chip is an XM25QH256C[XIQ] in a WSON8 package (6x8), I didn't want to desolder the chip and I noticed some exposed solder where the contacts would be so I did the dump using a pogo pin contraption attached to the CH341a. It is an old programmer I've had for years (I don't think there's any cheap-ish alternative using at least USB 2.0 that is supported by Flashrom, so... it was slow), both Vcc and the data lines ran at 3.3-ish volts.
After the message that appeared during the read I thought "damn, I didn't enable verbose output nor was I logging the operation", so I did a verify operation afterwards which is essentially the same. Log is attached and if you need the contents of the ROM I can attach them too (32MiB).
I didn't do much in-depth analysis of the ROM but it seems correct, at least I can see UEFI and ME structures in there.
Sadly, I don't plan on writing to that chip anytime soon, at least not until I get a replacement because the setup is not very stable and I don't want to risk the connection getting interrupted. These XMC chips are hard to come by in my area, but Mouser sells an equivalent Winbond that is also supported and is greenlit to be used in this laptop; so I had ordered one of those to have at hand.
Anyway, I digress haha, you have the Verify log attached to this email (I thought there'd be more data there).
Regards, James.
PS. I think it's not implemented, but perhaps adding a progress indicator (since the flash chip's size is known) to read/write operations would be handy, if it weren't for an indicator LED on my programmer board I wouldn't really know if it was progressing or not. _______________________________________________ flashrom mailing list -- flashrom@flashrom.org To unsubscribe send an email to flashrom-leave@flashrom.org
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James Russell -
Thomas Heijligen