[flashrom] Flashrom failed on Axiomtek eBOX620-823 embedded computer

[David Hendricks]

On Tue, Sep 6, 2011 at 2:13 PM, Kenneth Frost <kfrost at oemcontrols.com>wrote:

> Greetings,
>
> I tried to flash this system with an updated bios using flashrom utility.
>  The flash chip found was a "SST 49LF008A".    I successfully read the flash
> to a filename, verified the image read and determined the flash chip on the
> board.


Hi Ken,
I would guess that there is some GPIO-controlled write protection mechanism
enabled on that board. Sometimes you can disable these thru BIOS settings,
though it's entirely up to the vendor whether or not to expose that.

Of course, rebooting and toggling that setting in the BIOS is sort of a pain
and probably unfeasible if you wish to support more than a small handful of
motherboards. So it's usually preferable to toggle that setting in Flashrom.
In Flashrom's board_enable.c file, you'll see several routines which do
things like raise a GPIO to disable write protection. You'll probably need
to do something similar for your board.

If you're reasonably familiar with the chipset you're using (SCH US15WPT),
you can try to determine the write protection setting experimentally. Here
is one example of how to do it:
http://www.coreboot.org/pipermail/coreboot/2009-September/051987.html .

Much of the tedious info such gathering and calculating base addresses and
offsets can be found from flashrom verbose output when you perform a read
operation. iotools <http://code.google.com/p/iotools/> can also make your
life easier when doing simple low-level operations.

-- 
David Hendricks (dhendrix)
Systems Software Engineer, Google Inc.
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