Dell inspiron 5502 - Manufacturing mode NVME not detected help

[dssence]

Hi thanks for the excellent and precious help in here, I’m having a problem with this notebook Inspiron 5502, does nothing on power on, totally dead checked cmos, measured all standby voltages 5v/3v perfect. So I managed to find a dump on the net I’m leaving the googledrive link . I flashed it to the 2 flash roms but now the machine turns on and enters manufacturing mode and Nvme is not detected.

1) I would be more than grateful if someone could check the original dump and the dump I found on the net which makes the machine turn on properly with the added problem of manufacturingmode ( beeping on the keyboad) + Nvme not detected.

2) I tried to open the 8mb dump with Flash image tool but it’s giving me an error. I don’t understand why.

3) I would be more than grateful if you can explain what’s happening that manufacturing mode got enabled is this a flag from MEngine also Nvme is not detected.

Dumps link
Dumps

Thanks again for helping !

[Fernando]

@dssence
Here is my comment:

1. It was not a good idea to flash a dumped SPI or BIOS Region from another system, because you have lost this way important personal BIOS data.
2. It is no problem to open both linked *.bin files by using any AMI UEFI BIOS tool like the UEFITool or the AMI Aptio IV MMTool.

Edit: Since I was wrong regarding the missing NVMe modules, I have deleted the last 2 points.

[lfb6]

@Fernando

…

1. It was not a good idea to flash a dumped SPI or BIOS Region from another system, because you have lost this way important personal BIOS data.
2. It is no problem to open both linked *.bin files by using any AMI UEFI BIOS tool like the UEFITool or the AMI Aptio IV MMTool.
3. None of the both *.bin files contain an NVMe EFI file. Booting off an NVMe SSD (except Samsung 950 Pro) will not be possible with these BIOSes.
4. If you want use an NVMe SSD as bootable system drive, you should insert the missing NVMe module into the specific BIOS Region, which was within your PC’s BIOS chip before flashing someone else’s SPI or BIOS dump. …

This is a rather new bios, ME 15, and it contains several modules that contain ‘NVME’: NVMExpressDXE, NVMExpressPEI, NVMEPciHcPei, so I’d assume that no additional modules will be needed.

Flashing an ‘internet dump’ might be a valid test- method, if you are a 100% sure that you have a valid backup of the original firmware!

Manufacturing mode is only known to me when it comes to Intel ME, but older ME versions were just tolerating that? What are you referring to?

You can’t open parts of the firmware in FIT, it has to be complete/ content of both chips combined to get the structure (or you can work just on the ME- region, normally not recommended).

"Normal procedure" would be comparing the corresponding stock bios version to your bricked bios, searching for parts that may be specific for your machine- ‘classic’ is padding after NVRAM, here 2 DVAR entries which contain at least a model, serial, an windows code… (but both dumps don’t have these values on the same place)

Take the bricked own dump, exchange the bios region with a stock bios region (didn’t check, what Dell is providing), and see what is going to happen. If the machine works, but has just serial, service tag missing, try to insert these modules into the firmware again.

It might help to know what you did to brick the bios? If it’s a bios setting one simply could start with an empty ‘stock’ NVRAM, for example.