Fwd: Trying to flash a Winbond W25Q64.W on CH341A with 1.8V adapter

[Marius Schrecker]

Hi,

I recently bought two VMAC V1 Mini PC's with Winbond W25Q64FWSIG EFI chips. Updating the EFI information on teh devices using the normal software route is extremely flakey and I managed to corrupt the EFI on both boards, making them unbootable.

I now have a Chinese CH341a ("Black Edition") usb programmer and a "piggy-back" 1.8v adapter and can connect to the Winbond chip using a test clip.

I installed flashrom from the debian package V0.99 and can do a:

Initially, I thought I had problems getting the clip properly seated, but no matter how much I clean the contacts and re-seat the clip, if I do a:
 #flashrom -p ch341a_spi -V

I get (randomly):
Found Winbond flash chip "unknown Winbond (ex Nexcom) SPI chip" (0 kB, SPI) on ch341a_spi.
Found Generic flash chip "unknown SPI chip (RDID)" (0 kB, SPI) on ch341a_spi.
Found Winbond flash chip "W25Q64.W" (8192 kB, SPI) on ch341a_spi.

Finding the correct chip or not seems to have little or nothing to do with the physical contact to the chip.
If I then try to erase the chip. I get:

# flashrom -p ch341a_spi -c W25Q64.W -E
flashrom v0.9.9-r1954 on Linux 4.10.1-towo.1-siduction-amd64 (x86_64)
flashrom is free software, get the source code at https://flashrom.org

Calibrating delay loop... OK.
Found Winbond flash chip "W25Q64.W" (8192 kB, SPI) on ch341a_spi.
Erasing and writing flash chip... FAILED at 0x00000000! Expected=0xff, Found=0x00, failed byte count from 0x00000000-0x00000fff: 0x1000
ERASE FAILED!
Reading current flash chip contents... done. Looking for another erase function.
FAILED at 0x00000000! Expected=0xff, Found=0x00, failed byte count from 0x00000000-0x00007fff: 0x53cb
ERASE FAILED!
Reading current flash chip contents... done. Looking for another erase function.
FAILED at 0x00000000! Expected=0xff, Found=0xd6, failed byte count from 0x00000000-0x0000ffff: 0x9264
ERASE FAILED!
Reading current flash chip contents... done. Looking for another erase function.
FAILED at 0x00000000! Expected=0xff, Found=0x00, failed byte count from 0x00000000-0x007fffff: 0x5e1391
ERASE FAILED!
Reading current flash chip contents... done. Looking for another erase function.
FAILED at 0x00000000! Expected=0xff, Found=0x00, failed byte count from 0x00000000-0x007fffff: 0x5ce187
ERASE FAILED!
Looking for another erase function.
No usable erase functions left.
FAILED!
Your flash chip is in an unknown state.
Please report this on IRC at chat.freenode.net (channel #flashrom) or
mail [e-mail], thanks!

Again, the hex codes for the failures seem pretty random and are different each time I try the command.

I attach the log.

Can anyone say what's going on?

Best Regards

Marius