Bricked Intel NUC8i7BEH after update

[tomyt]

Hi Everyone,

I had an intel NUC8i7BEH that got bricked after doing the latest update. When I pressed the power button it lights up but no output signal at all after the update. I initially tried the jumper USB recovery methods but they didn’t work.

That was a few months ago, and recently I got a CH341a and hoped I could extract the BIOS from the NUC. But I found out that now the NUC doesn’t have any response at all when I press the power button (no blue LED on button, no fan spin, etc.). Power is normal since the internal power LED lights up.

Anyways, I still managed to extract a BIOS dump from the BIOS chip, but I’m a new user and can’t upload any files. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[MeatWar]

Yes, as new user you still can’t… but with plenty free sharing services/clouds providers out there, all you have to do is post a link to your shared file.

[tomyt]

Thanks, here’s a link to my bios dump

[chinobino]

@tomyt Hi and welcome to Win-Raid forums.

There is a trust level system for all members of winraid and level1techs forums.

You are currently trust level 0 and you must reach trust level 1 to upload attachments.

You can get to trust level 1 by:

Entering at least 5 topics
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Spend a total of 10 minutes reading posts

It looks like the CH341a read the BIOS chip ok, a lot of the structure is intact and the dump can very likely be repaired.

Do you know what the BIOS version was prior to the update?

Do you know what version it attempted to update to? If so, do you have a link to the BIOS update?

The dump is showing NUC8i5BE which I assume is the same firmware used on the NUC8i7BEH, with 2 microcodes for CPUID 806EA which supports the i7-8559U.

I will tag @lfb6 and ask if they could please have a look into this, as they are very knowledgeable on BIOS structure and repairing corrupt BIOS.

[lfb6]

Is this a valid dump? Did you dump it twice with a 100 % identical result?

Reason I’m asking is that there’s indeed signs of a not finished update, but there’s no sign of an aborted flashing process.

Instead of that there are a lot of single bit errors- except for the last 3 EFI volumes:

[tomyt]

I did 3 dumps and the MD5 values were the same. I couldn’t remember what BIOS it came with, but it must’ve been an old version since I’ve bought it off eBay and the seller has left it on the shelf for a few years.

The version I tried to update to was 0089, and I read a post here about big jumps in bios version causing issues.

Could there be corruption when I did the USB recovery method? I’m not sure why but I can’t find the original articles and bios files downloaded from the intel site anymore.

[MeatWar]

Side note, it is stated by Intel that updates made to the 0090 version will prevent the NUC from boot, current latest version seems to be 0092.

[tomyt]

Actually, I went through my folders again. I think I did try the 0092 version initially. Then after the update it didn’t show anything, so I tried USB recovering with 0092. After that I downloaded the 0089 version here (because Intel’s site only had the latest version to download) to see if another version would help, but neither of them did anything.

[lfb6]

As written, this is not a disrupted flash process. There are hundreds of bits changed but always in a pattern, but the higher ‘count’ isn’t always on the same side:

In addition it seems that from recovery areas the ‘backup recovery areas’ were tried to flash. (Some EFI volumes are kinda duplicate in the update file:

Looks a little bit like a dead chip to me? I’d recommend reading it again with a different program.

You can otherwise try to flash this file (bios region corrected, ME not touched, 1 NVRAM volume full):
bios_dump_89.zip (6.8 MB)

But read it back in a separate process, save it again with a different name and compare both files- they have to be a 100% identical, not a single bit difference!

If that’s not the case try another setup!