[flashrom] MSI Neo4-F/Neo4/Neo4 Platinum clarification (Re: Scary error message)

[Uwe Hermann]

Hi folks,

(I'm deliberately breaking the thread otherwise most people will
probably miss this as the original thread is from Nov 2009)

On Wed, Dec 23, 2009 at 04:08:10AM +0100, Luc Verhaegen wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 09, 2009 at 08:45:45PM -0800, Fraser Hanson wrote:
> > Hi,
> > 
> > I flashed my bios with flashrom tonight and got the scary warning
> > message saying "erase failed" and "do not reboot".
> > 
> > I haven't rebooted.
> > 
> > As far as I can tell from using flashrom itself, everything is
> > actually fine. The erase appears to have failed at physical address 0,
> > which I would guess means that nothing actually happened.
> > 
> > I had taken a dump of the original bios before starting, and "flashrom
> > -v" now verifies that it is identical.
> > 
> > Furthermore, a new dump of the bios matches the original dump from
> > before I tried to write the bios.
> > 
> > My board is an MSI K8N Neo4 Platinum.
> > 
> > Output from my dump attempt and subsequent messing around follows.
> > 
> > Do I have your blessing to reboot my machine?
> > 
> > --Fraser
> 
> -> r816.
> 
> Luc Verhaegen.

I'm browsing some old board reports on the mailing list and stumbled
upon this one here. What we have right now in svn trunk is this:

   * Suited for:
   *  - MSI K8N Neo4: NVIDIA CK804

   [...]

   {0x10DE, 0x005E, 0x1462, 0x7125,  0x10DE, 0x0052, 0x1462, 0x7125, NULL,
   NULL,         NULL,          "MSI",         "K8N Neo4-F",            0,
   OK, nvidia_mcp_gpio2_raise},


I.e., the comment talks about "MSI K8N Neo4" while the name in the
board-enable is "MSI K8N Neo4-F" (note the added -F). However, in

  http://www.flashrom.org/pipermail/flashrom/2009-November/000889.html

the user reported that the board is a "K8N Neo4 Platinum (PCB 1.0)" from

  http://www.msi.com/index.php?func=proddesc&maincat_no=1&prod_no=165

On the MSI page, searching for "neo4" I can see:

  K8N Neo4 Platinum (PCB 1.0)
  K8N Neo4 Platinum (PCB 3.0)
  K8N Neo4-F (PCB 1.0)
  K8N Neo4-F (PCB 3.0)
  K8N Neo4-FI (PCB 1.0)
  K8N Neo4-FX (PCB 1.0)

So there are two Neo4-F versions (probably differing hardware) and two
Neo4-F versions (also potentially differing hardware). I cannot spot any
pure "Neo4" board without any suffix on the current website.

Fraser, could you please use the latest flashrom from svn and send us
the following info:

 * flashrom -V
 * lspci -nnvvvxxx
 * superiotool -deV

Also, can you confirm that the board you have is indeed "K8N Neo4
Platinum (PCB 1.0)"? It's probably best to check what is actually
printed on the board itself, I wouldn't entirely trust dmidecode or
similar tools.

We should fix the board name in the code in one direction or the other.
It would also be nice to get a report of whether the current
board-enable for the mainboard works (this requires a write or erase
test), I think we never got a report, so we should probably mark the
board-enable as untested for now.


Thanks, Uwe.
-- 
http://hermann-uwe.de     | http://sigrok.org
http://randomprojects.org | http://unmaintained-free-software.org