[CH341a Problem] Which bios_ph1 Cable for ASRock Z270 Pro4?

Unbelievable… of course the SPI as an ID… grab the damm smartphone and zoom in.

EDIT: Get a cheap Zeiss x6 or x8 pocket lens, ok so its a JV not a JF as you first selected…

image

Would you mind checking the colours according to your connection? Had to guess violet, blue and orange, are they correct?

Cell Phone is not enough, I had to get a USB microscope.

@lfb6
This are both sides, as far as I can tell the connection is correct.

My EZP2019+ Programmer only offers “Winbond W25Q128”
My XGecu does have more specific subtypes and goes up to “Winbond W25Q128JV”
However, my chip also has “SQ” at the end
But unfortunately my XGecu does not get more specifc after “JV”.

I was hoping they are so similar that it should work in theory. But perhaps not. If the latter is the case then there is no way to make it work with my chip because there is no “-SQ”

I have tried with this “-JV” subtype and I still get the same errors

By the cap you show you had the JV and you selected JF and used it to program…
this doesnt mean nothing or it can…it all depends on the apps/prog database and the cmds from it.
The “SQ” is not used here, its usually Package type and special options, read the DS , its all there and recheck connections.

EDIT: No you dont have OTP… did you read the DS?, without reading we dont learn, and the link i provided should had been the 1rst thing to look for after visually identified the SPI before any actions… as you did.
Last tip, some system boards needs psu standby power ON, with or without CMOS battery ON/OFF, over_n_out, good luck.

Yes, Before I used the USB microscope I was using the xGecu “Chip ID - Automatic detection” option and I tried multiple of the chips on the list (that say SOIC8), and they all gave me the same problem.

I think at one point I ran the programmer with the “BV OTP”. So I don’t know if by doing this I possibly damaged the chip. Maybe my chip is now damaged. I don’t know. Is this a possibility?

This whole time I have been trying to figure out if this OTP term plays any role.


This link you provided says:

“UID and OTP feature” maybe I have to select the OTP variant? I am not here trying to troll you or to make you angry, I am just asking a question. Is this “Can this OTP thing be a possible issue?”

These are the JV options

I did try with and without battery but never with any standby power.
I will have to try with the Standby Power, I suspect this is going to solve the problem.

Unfortunately, that was not the solution. I tried it and it didn’t work.

Here is a clue that I want to share as I further investigate my problems

Maybe instead of wiring it into the (Dual In-Line Package) socket I should be using the ICSP port on my xGecu tl866ii plus programmer.
It is 6 pins instead of 8 pins. It is the same pins minus pin 4 (ground) and pin 8 (VCC).

and I can try to use the pins in this thread but then convert into the ICSP version and as show in the picture above in the xGecu support materials.

I can then try to do this multiple ways:
A. Without standby power, without battery
B. Without standby power, with battery
C. With standby power, without battery
D. With standby power, with battery

And just as a bonus for verification purposes, this diagram also uses the MISO MOSI terms. It seems like a lot of different manuals are referring to the same pins with very different terms so it is very confusing. Unfortunately the J3455M manual uses very bad terms that I have not seen anywhere else “DQ0, DQ1, DQ2, DQ3”. So I am trying to do my own investigative work here to actually verify the equivalent terms.

As far as I can see you interchanged yellow and orage?

  • Try to put yellow and orange in the right position

  • Try without connecting both yellow and orange

  • Try different programs (if they work with your ‘advanced’ programmers)
    AsProgrammer, Flashrom, Neoprogrammer

  • If they don’t work with your programmers buy a CH341, avoid any mods (they aren’t necessary) and try with AsProgrammer, Flashrom, Neoprogrammer

For all these variants: try with and without CMOS battery

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Yes, I did correct that yellow-orange swap. And I tried flashing again, but I still got an error. If I may have damaged my chip by doing this, they I may have already damaged it. x(

Okay I will try a couple of things, thanks for the ideas

Don’t think you damaged your chip.

CH341 has some advantages since it’s simple and kinda ‘stupid’- it doesn’t check too much (anything?), it just does ‘something’ and works with many programs…
So if you’re aware of the caveats and check for them, it may solve some problems.

Samsung Notebook, SIO3 by design on GND, TL866 doesn’t work

CH341 still works when IO2, IO3 GND disconnected

Did you try to disconnect yellow and orange (and maybe brown)?

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Just want to post an official clean table of all the equivalent names of the pins for clarity.

I was busy and I had to go AFK but I will try new things. I have already attempted without the yellow & orange pins and it does not work at all. I will have to try with a “dumb programmer”.
I will keep you updated

I tried without the yellow/orange pins and with/without ground

and I was able to write a bunch of 00’s into the chip but not much more.

I also tried the ICSP connection, and it ended up being identical to removing orange/yellow (Hold/reset + Write Protection) because I am not able to short them into VCC as the xGecu says.
I also dont have a 30P capacitor on hand to connect between MISO and ground. Which is why it ended up being identical to what you proposed.

I was able to “stupify” the xGecu by disabling options like
“pin detect, verify after, check ID”
image

I posted in the xGecu Forum and some guy there has a printer with the same chip, and he says that his chip has a lot of status Register values = 1 (specifically LB1, LB2, LB3), and he says that these values set to provide “advanced write protection”. Something like that. He says he has the same issues with the chip on his printer…

My status register just says


Which does not indicate that there is any write protection.

But the problem is that I cant even read/write the thing properly so who knows.
I don’t know if the reading of the Status Register is even reliable or even a relevant information. But it is an interesting point.

The only thing I have been able to do successfully so far, I believe is erasing the chip lol.

Maybe I can buy a new chip with pre-flashed bios in it and just solder it onto the board. I will order one of those now as a “last option” since it takes a while to arrive anyway.

Do you know if this is possible?

I can desolder this strange chip that cannot be flashed and put in a new chip, but I was wondering if I could use the SPI header to create an adapter and just have the bios be read from there

image

something like this, but it on top of the BIOS_PH1, that way it becomes removable like a the DIP8 packages.

It could be an interesting mod

There are easier solutions (didn’t check measures thouroughly, they exist fitting for your chip):

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Good news, I have a CH341A now and I can try doing what the original poster did. I will also connect pins 3 and 7 (Hold/Reset + Write protection) to motherboard ground as the original poster did.

I will report back with update.

UPDATE.

ABSOLUTELY NOTHING worked. I gave up on this pin method.

I simply Desoldered it the old fashiond way and I put it into an adapter and I was able to flash it with absolutely no problem!

At first I thought that the pin 3, 7 was just my mistake but it seems that the documentation on this thread has some contradictory layouts for the pins.
It simply takes too much effort for me to figure out what is going wrong.

It would be possible to check the header layout with a multimeter.
This way you could differentiate if it’s really a difficult board or if the header layout of this specific board is different.

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I want to say this pinout works on my z270 gaming k6. I grounded WP and Hold lines to the ground pins on one of the usb 2.0 headers. I also found I needed to set the bios reset jumper to clear. Works a charm now!

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Was your power supply connected to the motherboard and switched on or off?

Power supply unhooked. Cmos reset to clear. Gotta jump a pin from the header to ground (I used one of the usb 2.0 headers ground pins) worked aces aftet that. Oh and at least with my qtj1 I had stability issues under heavy stress testing if I didn’t cap the chip to 130A. Took me forever to track that down. If you can’t figure it out bump this and I’ll try to figure out the pin to ground when I get up. It should be in this thread though!

Well I actually tried EVERYTHING on a ASRock Z370 Pro4.

+/- PSU +/- CMOS Battery +/- IO2-to-IO3 (WP-to-Hold) pin crossover +/- RSMRST#-to-GND +/- CLRCMOS pin shorting +/- “Ignore Chip ID” setting on XGecu Pro flashing software.

The farthest I ever got with this was being able to have XGecu give me “Pin test passed” and getting a correct chip Identification. I am also able to read the ROM by removing “Chip ID verification” during the reading process. But once I save that ROM and try to open it with CoffeeTime 0.99, the latter will say “Corrupt ROM image”.

So I gave up on that “BIOS_PH1” method. I did the good old desoldering and reading method and it works perfectly.

I am now installing a SMT socket from adafruit as pointed out by user “lfb6” and that way if I ever change the processor I can also re-enable Intel ME if I want to.

The IO2-to-IO3 (“WP-to-Hold/Reset” or “SI-to-SO”) pin crossover point might sound like nonsense, but I was analyzing all of the images posted on this his thread and some of them do have those pins switched. And then I found this image from an MSI board with a similar header from the following thread MSI JSPI1 Firmware Recovery (Flashcat / Raspberry Pi) | TechPowerUp Forums
MSI calls it “JSPI1” instead of “BIOS_PH1”, and you can see that they also do mention this crossover. So, I tried that too. Just in case you were wondering. The people here that say they got it to work, I have no idea how. I even tried that CH341A junk thing and I tried various flashing software programs. The whole thing was just a total waste of time for me unfortunately :face_with_symbols_over_mouth:

But the good news is that simply desoldering and resoldering works fine. I just don’t like the process since I am not the most experienced so there is some risk involved. But with this SMT socket everything should be fine.

I cannot comment on the amperage but thanks for the heads up, if I run into any issues I will keep it in mind.

And Just a heads-up for you, when I was using the BGA-1440 mod with ME Corporate Cut, I noticed that whenever I turned the PC off in Windows 11 Pro, it would simply act as though I clicked on Restart. It was extremely annoying. I remember having fixed it but just enabling all of the C-states in the BIOS. I didn’t look into it any further.

–UPDATE–
I just launched my QTJ1, only to my mod worked perfectly but I didn’t flash the version with Re-BAR support…


I was running CPU-Z stress tests and was consistently getting a multi-core score of 70% in when using the 9900KF as reference. I actually thought it was all due to thermal throttling, but then you mentioned the current settings so I went ahead and just entered “9999” on every field so that it would automatically enter the maximum values of 255 and 4096 etc. And then I just set all my fans to MAX to be safe (thermal throttling is enabled), ring-core offset disabled, Tj Max was lowered to 90 (default is 105).

Then I ran the CPU-Z benchmark again and bam. I got 9900KF performance without a problem at an all core boost of 47 and uncore ratio of 43. I didnt even set those to 49 or 50 like on the real 9900K and I still got the same score. The entire problem was the current setting. The CPU voltage is set to positive offset “auto”.

The fact that you have that 130A limit may be thermal throttling. Mine is actually a “Comet Lake”, we seem to have the same chip though, so this is strange. The only sad part for mine is that the chip wont even reach RAM speed of 2666, it only works at 2133 (4 DIMMs), which is a bit pathetic, but maybe I can tighten the timings later. First, I will try to do the Re-BAR mod… Here is the proof:
image
I think you should be able to max out the current settings (with very good cooling). Im using the latest microcodes though. I am using microcode revision FA, not EA (CoffeeTime 0.99) nor C6 (ASRock lastest BIOS).