[flashrom] Technical Advisory / Gigabyte GA-F2A88XM-DS2P, Dual MX25L6406E

[Dieter Miosga]

Dear all,

receive the terminal output of my action to reflash the Master BIOS chip
of the forenamed Motherboard, according to the advice in this output.

SYMPTOMS
=======

After acquiring a Gigabyte GA-F2A88XM-DS2P from mercadoactual.es,
I equipped it with an AMD Athlon X4 845 Carrizo/Excavator and a pair of 
4GB DDR3 1600MHz
RAM (1.35V) bars together with an older GeForce NVIDIA 512MB graphics 
card of Chinese production.
All did work very well over the Thursday evening, Friday and a weekend 
and I had the
benefit of several kernel compilations for which I recommend this 
composition of Hardware.
After a long session, wherein the OpenSuSE Leap 42.3
and the XUbuntu-17.10.1 installations were updated and I did experiment 
with the BIOS settings,
I encountered the board going on in endless idle reboots after reaching 
the Gigabyte UEFI BIOS screen,
in the next morning after switching the system on again, attempting to 
compile the x86-64 arch version
of the kernel with enabled AVX2 instructions.
For all fury and rage, the regular methods of hard resetting the BIOS to 
the factory defaults
showed no effect. Short cutting the CMOS-Reset pin pair showed no effect
and then removing the battery with short cutting the contacts without and
under voltage, with running ventilator or switched off with power supply 
on, neither.

I passed the board to the local hardware supporter for examination and 
remedy if possible.

During the following days when I did notify the support of mercadoactual
and had to support a stressing and time taking communication,
I had to notice that an arbitrary administrative intervention on my 
publications
in the github.com site did falsely edit some of the update comments, 
appearing
behind changed sections of the contents.
The communication with the mercadoactual stuff  was awful and led me to
the assumption that they are not authorized resellers who can merge the
board into a technical support procedure of Gigabyte.
Gigabyte's web support is from Google and Facebook protected and
shows no local national settlement address.

I did get  the board returned to my hands with the unaltered symptom of
endless idle looping reboot at UEFI screen and the confirmation of the 
symptoms,
two days before the conceded 14 days of customers devolution end.
A call to the Gigabyte support in Hamburg/Germany ended
after some authoritative advises, that all were already anticipated by 
my work prudence,
with no further information helping to resolve the problem.



RESOLVED
=======

With the FLASHROM  utility of free and open source software, using a 
CH341A USB to SPI programmer
together with a clip to seize the pins of the master MX25L6406E chip, it was
possible to reset the BIOS to a reusable state.
Thereafter, the BIOS did not reboot itself in an endless idle loop
and the Gigabyte Dual BIOS mechanism did detect a corrupt primary BIOS
on the UEFI screen and prompted for to over program the primary from the 
backup BIOS.
After answering yes and awaiting the copy progress to finish, the 
Motherboard did work
alike  from the first moments on.
I did flash in the regular and for now only one version from Gigabyte 
support directly from
the web pages of gigabyte.com  showing the technical descriptions of the 
GA-F2A88XM-DS2P.

It remains unclear whether the FLASHROM utility does respect and handle  
protected areas
sufficiently correct and whether the error messages do mean only the 
confirmation of a necessary erase
to restore the BIOS by  interrupting a skip  over instead of erase to 
the sections that are zeroed or oned out.

Therefore it is not comprehensible that the second and backup BIOS 
differs from the
first and used one and I do not know what happened if I had answered the 
question of the
DualBIOS mechanism with NO, neither what will happen if the copied BIOS 
contains the
same corrupt sections that led to symptoms described above.


URGED
=====

It is necessary to forward the fore standing facts not only to the 
FLASHROM developers
but also to Gigabyte support. Who will hook in to Facebook to roll out 
the necessary remedy?
I don't want to.

The sold hardware in use is hard to change physically to a mechanism
that fully complies with the MX25L6406E BIOS chip design's architectural 
intentions.
The BIOS has to be revised and reprogrammed, shall be edited and
should contain at least a feature to seek for a connected FAT32 USB 
memory stick
containing an original BIOS binary file,
After a certain number of boot attempts to a defined boot procedure level,
that binary should be reflashed to the primary BIOS chip.

The technical supporter and I did encounter a restriction in the BIOS 
that does
prohibit the use of older Radeon graphic cards. This should be alleviated.

Further, it is necessary to raise the evidence level by the quality and 
amount of
documentation to the FLASHROM utility.


'And now they stand no more to cheat on others, but ask each other "How 
up!" '

Greetings

Dieter Miosga

https://github.com/yainit/


-------------- next part --------------
sys304leap423:/ # flashrom -p ch341a_spi -w /88XMDS2P.F1
flashrom  on Linux 4.15.18.yainitiuall_1805I-core64 (x86_64)
flashrom is free software, get the source code at https://flashrom.org

Using clock_gettime for delay loops (clk_id: 1, resolution: 1ns).
No EEPROM/flash device found.
Note: flashrom can never write if the flash chip isn't found automatically.
sys304leap423:/ # flashrom -p ch341a_spi -w /88XMDS2P.F1
flashrom  on Linux 4.15.18.yainitiuall_1805I-core64 (x86_64)
flashrom is free software, get the source code at https://flashrom.org

Using clock_gettime for delay loops (clk_id: 1, resolution: 1ns).
Found Macronix flash chip "MX25L6405" (8192 kB, SPI) on ch341a_spi.
Found Macronix flash chip "MX25L6405D" (8192 kB, SPI) on ch341a_spi.
Found Macronix flash chip "MX25L6406E/MX25L6408E" (8192 kB, SPI) on ch341a_spi.
Found Macronix flash chip "MX25L6436E/MX25L6445E/MX25L6465E/MX25L6473E" (8192 kB, SPI) on ch341a_spi.
Multiple flash chip definitions match the detected chip(s): "MX25L6405", "MX25L6405D", "MX25L6406E/MX25L6408E", "MX25L6436E/MX25L6445E/MX25L6465E/MX25L6473E"
Please specify which chip definition to use with the -c <chipname> option.
sys304leap423:/ # flashrom -p ch341a_spi -c  "MX25L6406E/MX25L6408E"  -w /88XMDS2P.F1
flashrom  on Linux 4.15.18.yainitiuall_1805I-core64 (x86_64)
flashrom is free software, get the source code at https://flashrom.org

Using clock_gettime for delay loops (clk_id: 1, resolution: 1ns).
No EEPROM/flash device found.
Note: flashrom can never write if the flash chip isn't found automatically.
sys304leap423:/ # flashrom -p ch341a_spi -c  "MX25L6406E/MX25L6408E"  -w /88XMDS2P.F1
flashrom  on Linux 4.15.18.yainitiuall_1805I-core64 (x86_64)
flashrom is free software, get the source code at https://flashrom.org

Using clock_gettime for delay loops (clk_id: 1, resolution: 1ns).
Found Macronix flash chip "MX25L6406E/MX25L6408E" (8192 kB, SPI) on ch341a_spi.
Block protection could not be disabled!
Reading old flash chip contents... done.
Erasing and writing flash chip... FAILED at 0x00000000! Expected=0xff, Found=0x20, failed byte count from 0x00000000-0x00000fff: 0x1000
ERASE FAILED!
Reading current flash chip contents... done. Looking for another erase function.
FAILED at 0x00000000! Expected=0xff, Found=0xc2, failed byte count from 0x00000000-0x0000ffff: 0x10000
ERASE FAILED!
Reading current flash chip contents... done. Looking for another erase function.
FAILED at 0x0001ffe8! Expected=0xff, Found=0xaa, failed byte count from 0x00010000-0x0001ffff: 0x17
ERASE FAILED!
Reading current flash chip contents... done. Looking for another erase function.
FAILED at 0x00000000! Expected=0xff, Found=0x00, failed byte count from 0x00000000-0x007fffff: 0x53000
ERASE FAILED!
Reading current flash chip contents... done. Looking for another erase function.
Erase/write done.
Verifying flash... FAILED at 0x00000000! Expected=0xff, Found=0x00, failed byte count from 0x00000000-0x007fffff: 0x6953b9
Your flash chip is in an unknown state.
Please report this on IRC at chat.freenode.net (channel #flashrom) or
mail flashrom at flashrom.org, thanks!
sys304leap423:/ #