[flashrom] Asus A7NVM400 (A7NX8-VM400)

[Stefan Tauner]

On Thu, 17 Nov 2011 14:58:23 +0200
Svante Olofsson <svante at fyraess.com> wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> I tried to flash an A7N8X-VM400 board with the current bios (got it with
> flashrom -r). The current bios rom was of identical size as the downloaded
> newer bios rom. I figured it would be safest to try to flash with the old
> one :)

hello

by "old one" you mean the backed up rom contents i guess?
well in newer versions of flashrom this would lead to a complete
skipped write because it checks for equal content on the chip before
erasing anything ;)

what is more of a problem is the *old* version of flashrom you have
used, as you have seen...

> 
> The information below is copied from the terminal:
> 
> svante at stereo:~$ sudo flashrom -wV current_A7NVM400-ASUS.080009.rom
> flashrom v0.9.1-r946
> […]
> Flash image seems to be a legacy BIOS. Disabling checks.
> Writing flash chip... Erasing flash chip... Looking at blockwise erase
> function 0... trying... 0x000000-0x000fff, ERASE FAILED at 0x00000008!
> Expected=0xff, Read=0x4c, failed byte count from 0x00000000-0x00000fff:
> 0xfdc
> ERASE FAILED!
> 
> Looking at blockwise erase function 1... trying... 0x000000-0x00ffff, ERASE
> FAILED at 0x00000008! Expected=0xff, Read=0x4c, failed byte count from
> 0x00000000-0x0000ffff: 0xfed5
> ERASE FAILED!
> 
> Looking at blockwise erase function 2... trying... 0x000000-0x07ffff, ERASE
> FAILED at 0x00000008! Expected=0xff, Read=0x4c, failed byte count from
> 0x00000000-0x0007ffff: 0x687be
> ERASE FAILED!

this looks like a complete write protection, which is quite common...
see http://flashrom.org/Board_Enable for details.

> 
> what do you think, am I screwed?

not at all, but we will probably need to add some code to enable
writing on your board. first of all please get a current version of
flashrom from subversion and compile it.
http://flashrom.org/Downloads

then verify that the rom content is still the same as the backed up
image (e.g. flashrom -v backup.rom). then reply with the logs of the
following commands (run as root) attached/embedded:
lspci -xxnnvvv
flashrom -V
if possible also superiotool -deV

you can of course also try to reverse engineer the needed code yourself
as described here:
http://flashrom.org/Finding_Board_Enable_by_Reverse_Engineering

if you wait for us to do it it can take its time...

-- 
Kind regards/Mit freundlichen Grüßen, Stefan Tauner