[flashrom] Big problem with BIOS. Questions

Michael Karcher flashrom at mkarcher.dialup.fu-berlin.de
Tue Jan 18 01:08:12 CET 2011


Am Montag, den 17.01.2011, 18:43 -0300 schrieb Germán Rotondo:
> Flashing went OK. Flash memory detected OK, erased and programmed. After reset.  . . Dead netbook

> I have electronics skills, so I've taken it apart, and found that the
> motherboard has two identicalflash chips, EON 25F80.
> I've desoldered both chips, read both with an external programmer to
> see what was on them, first chip had the original AMI bios, that was
> on the netbook prior to flashing. The second one has the new ami bios
> I've flashed and bricked.
You did not happen to make a backup of "the" flashchip using flashrom
before you wrote the new BIOS? It might be that the chip detected by
flashrom is not used for system BIOS storage but contains some extended
code for the EC or even some cryptography/authorization stuff. If
killing one of the chips is enough, it does not really look like it is a
standard Dual BIOS setup.

> When first chip is removed, board does not even power up, so I think
> it might be the embedded controller bios, but it's a complete ami
> bios?.
It is imaginable that the netbook designers first tried to implement
shared flash but gave up for some reason and just doubled the flash
chip. In that case, of one chip, only the EC code and of the other chip,
only the non-EC code would be used. But that doesn't make sense with
your observation that it doesn't work after cloning the "old" BIOS.

> Any help, thoughts you could give me would be of great help
Regards,
  Michael Karcher





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