FAILED: ASUS P4P800

[Alan Kirby]

Hi Folks

Had a result from flashrom that asked me to send this log to you guys. I'm
certainly thankful for that.

The mainboard flash ROM had (probably still has) malware within it that is
persistent. Maybe it's lighteater. Since I haven't fully diagnosed it, I've
attached a 64KiB file that is a dump of the boot block: F'0000 - F'FFFF.
One of the things it does is prevent afudos (engineer's version) from
overwriting the boot block. Another thing it does : if you hit Enter at the
afudos command, then pull out the keyboard cable, the Disk Driver (INT 13h
handler) throws an error, saying there was a disk read error. That
shouldn't happen, so these interrupt handlers are checking up on each
other, in order to achieve overall persistence.

So, to get round these protections, I was attempting to shift away from
FreeDOS and flash the ROM from Linux - Ubuntu (Trust Tahr 6.0), in fact.

I see the warning about the mainboard-specific code but I couldn't tally
that with any action I should take. I saw that the ASUS P4P800 is supported
and that it is autodetected. I also tried putting different strings after
mainboard, whilst simply probing the hardware: =ASUS, =P4P800, =ASUS
P4P800, =ASUS:P4P800. Each generated an error. Removing the = and
everything after it worked - the probe worked without error. That gave me
confidence that I'd understood the autodetect part.

Regards

Alan K

# ./flashrom -p internal:mainboard -E
flashrom v0.9.6.1-r1563 on Linux 3.14.20 (i686)
flashrom is free software, get the source code at http://www.flashrom.org

Calibrating delay loop... OK.
Found chipset "Intel ICH5/ICH5R". Enabling flash write... OK.
WARNING: Your mainboard is ASUS P4P800, but the mainboard-specific
code has not been tested, and thus will not be executed by default.
Depending on your hardware environment, erasing, writing or even probing
can fail without running the board specific code.

Please see the man page (section PROGRAMMER SPECIFIC INFO, subsection
"internal programmer") for details.
Unhandled programmer parameters: mainboard
Found PMC flash chip "Pm49FL004" (512 kB, LPC, FWH) at physical address
0xfff80000.
Erasing and writing flash chip... ERASE FAILED at 0x00001c40 !
Expected=0xff, Read=0x44, failed byte count from 0x00001000-0x00001fff:
0x3a2
ERASE FAILED!
Reading current flash chip contents... done. ERASE FAILED at 0x00001c40 !
Expected=0xff, Read=0x44, failed byte count from 0x00000000-0x0000ffff:
0xe2c5
ERASE FAILED!
Reading current flash chip contents... done. ERASE FAILED at 0x00001c40 !
Expected=0xff, Read=0x44, failed byte count from 0x00000000-0x0007ffff:
0x7a92c
ERASE FAILED!
FAILED!
Your flash chip is in an unknown state.
Get help on IRC at chat.freenode.net (channel #flashrom) or
mail [e-mail] with the subject "FAILED: <your board name>"!
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DO NOT REBOOT OR POWEROFF!

A non-text attachment MR-F0000.BIN has been stripped.
It is available at http://paste.flashrom.org/view.php?id=2783