[flashrom] Is there a sure-fire way to reset any BIOS flash image to its default, out-of-the-box state with no special equipment?

[Stefan Tauner]

On Mon, 24 Feb 2014 23:54:40 -0800
linx255 at nym.hush.com wrote:

> Thanks for your helpful info!
> 
> My motherboard has no removable chips.  What kind of programming device would you recommend for a cutting edge Intel server board?  It's one of those 4" x 4" boards with everything compacted into one giant iCore3 chip.  I don't know that the BIOS/UEFI functionality is built into that or other non-removable ICs elsewhere on the board.  And if I get an appropriate programming device can one easily / readily learn to use it to read and write code?  I'm familiar with basic programming concepts, having worked with bash script, C, php, tcl, perl, html, et al.  No knowledge of how to adapt generic coreboot BIOS code to a specific motherboard.  Is it a matter of telling it what hardware to look for?  I imagine there may be all kinds of board-specific devices and functions that only an Intel designer or engineer would know about.  And even if I correctly port the code it seems I could still risk damaging the flash with a misstep of using the programmer—is that right?

Physically damaging the chip or board is seldom an issue, but the other
problems you mention are a major problem. Coreboot contains a lot of
code for all kinds of devices and often it is only a matter of telling
it which there are and how they are connected, but if you have to write
support for new hardware from scratch, there is often no documentation
at all for it... only good reverse engineers are then able to produce
something workable.

All of this is actually not really related to flashrom. Please refer to
the coreboot mailing list and documentation if you still want to pursue
this topic, thanks.

-- 
Kind regards/Mit freundlichen Grüßen, Stefan Tauner