[flashrom] MSI Z68MA-G45 report and on-board SPI flashing using Bus Pirate

[Denis 'GNUtoo' Carikli]

On Mon, 2012-06-18 at 10:40 +0000, Paul Kocialkowski wrote:
> I recently got myself a MSI Z68MA-G45 board. It's running with an Intel
> Z68 chipset, which has some support in flashrom and coreboot. 
However the board itself is not in coreboot yet(I suppose you want to
add support for it):
ls src/mainboard/msi/ gives:
Kconfig  ms6119  ms6147  ms6156  ms6178  ms7135  ms7260  ms9185  ms9282
ms9652_fam10
> First, I ran flashrom with the system on the board and it was able to
> correctly read the chip (see attached log). I uploaded the read data
> [1]. The UEFI interface proposed to save the UEFI image on usb storage
> [2]: I was then able to compare it to the read data from flashrom. It
> appears that the UEFI image are the last 0x600000 bytes of the BIOS ROM
> image (from 0x200000 to 0x7FFFFF).
Did you power off the mainboard? if not maybe that's why the buspirate
doesn't work.

> While searching for the BIOS chip on the board hardware, I saw a set of
> pins called "JSPI1", right next to the BIOS SPI chip [3].
So your BIOS chip can be accessed trough both SPI and FWH?

> The only SPI flasher I have is a Bus Pirate,
do you also have an Arduino uno? or an openmoko debug board left(if not
I can give you one back without the openmoko ribbon cable this summer)?

Note that the openmoko debug board is very undocumented.

Also Note that there was some recent patches touching the buspirate.


>it can be because of cable length: are the buspirate probe cables too
long for this? [9]
I'm not sure...but with the following setup:
http://www.flashrom.org/images/6/65/Serduino_laptop.jpeg
I had some trouble with reflashing the BIOS and flashrom retried once.

However it can also be the wiring, for instance is it correctly wired?
is the write protection on? (it's active-low so it should be high to
prevent write-protection...), is the chip select connected to the
buspirate?

you could also check the datasheet of your chip...

Denis.