ME Problem with ASUS STRIX Z490-F Gaming MB

[Simonfr]

Hi all,

Hoping I can get some direct advice on an issue with my ASUS STRIX Z490-F rev 1.0 MB, running latest BIOS 3201, with a Intel i9-10900kf CPU. CPU and MB support TPM, and MB should offer the fTPM option. This doesn’t seem to be working and stems from the ME FW being listing as 0.0.0.0.

I flashed the BIOS to the latest (from 2801) based on guidance from the local PC retailer where it was bought, but this didn’t reinstate the ME FW (nor did I really expect it to).

I’m not sure if the ME FW has been 0.0.0.0 from the day1, or if this has occurred following a BIOS update, but I only identified the issue once looking to be compliant for Windows 11, that requires TPM for the upgrade. This MB uses PTT to satisfy the TPM requirements for Windows 11, but for some reason I’m unable to get this enabled.

After some research and investigation into similar issues with ME and TPM in the ASUS STRIX BIOS & Z490-F, the problem appears to be that the ME FW has somehow not available corrupt, as it’s showing v 0.0.0.0 in the BIOS, therefore I can’t enable PTT, and ME device is not recognised by the current Win10 OS.

When querying the ME from the OS (FWUpldLcl64.exe) it shows :

Error 20: Cannot locate ME device.
Error 345: Display FW Version failed.

In the BIOS I have ensured that CMS is disabled and UEFI is enabled and booting successfully into Windows 10. For some reason in the BIOS the PCH-FW Configuration is just blank, there is no option to Enable or Disable the feature, which will effectively enable Intel PTT (fTPM).

I’m pretty technical but reprogramming a BIOS I think it a little beyond my capabilities. Any guidance or help would be great, as it appears that people that encounter this problem seem to be looking at reprogramming the BIOS to replace the corrupt ME FW, replacing the BIOS entirely or just throwing away this pain in the ass MB.


Edit by Fernando: Thread title shortened/customized

[lfb6]

There’s a lot of these problems in the forum, search and do some reading.

Two ways to solve this:

[Guide] Clean Dumped Intel Engine (CS)ME/(CS)TXE Regions with Data Initialization

Guide-How To: Clean Dumped Intel Engine (CS)ME/(CS)TXE Regions with Data Initialization Last Updated: 2020-07-22 This guide is relevant to those who need to clean the DATA section of an Engine (CSME, ME, CSTXE, TXE) Region, which is part of a dumped SPI/BIOS image, in order to flash the latter on a different machine of the same OEM model. It is not meant as a guide on how to completely transform a dumped Engine region into a stock Intel-provided one. Although the guide can be used for that some…

OR
There’s an image for the 8 MB chip containing FD and a ‘fresh’ ME (state ‘configured’) ‘hidden’ in Asus bios updates:

‘Extract as is’ should give you a file precisely 0x800000 in size which can be written with a hardware programmer directly to the chip. Older version, so one would need to run the latest ASUS ME update afterwards.

(If ever a fTPM was in use it might’ve been used for disk encryption - be sure to have recovery information at hand)