Long time, no see! Hope things are good here.
My brother has brought a refurbished Dell Latitude E5440 (Intel Core i5-4210U). Interestingly, the bios can’t be updated. Similar reports do exist, but suggested solutions (such as disabling virtualization support) are not effective in this case.
- The current version of the bios is A06. I can’t find this particular version on Dell’s support site. Whatever version my brother tries, it skips the actual updation part and simply restarts. It happens with the Windows flasher, flashing from DOS as well as from the built-in updater inside the firmware.
- There is a long black screen after booting the laptop (for both legacy and UEFI Windows installation).
- No “Intel management engine” device in OS, so unable to install the driver.
- No abnormal shutdown after xx minutes; it continues to work without any issue.
- MEInfo tells that the platform is unsupported.
- ME Analyzer can’t detect the presence of ME inside the 14 MB bios dump shared by my brother (made using Universal BIOS Backup Toolkit). According to him, FPT also tells that the platform is unsupported.
Any clue?
@Tito :
Yes, everything (except the Corona virus spread) is fine here.
You may have to wait until our Intel ME Guru @plutomaniac has the required time to read your request.
Download ME System Tools v9.5, run Flash Programming Tool with “fptw64 -d spi.bin” command to check if you have read access to the full SPI/BIOS chip. If you don’t see a CPU access error or similar, dump the SPI/BIOS chip via “fptw64 -d spi.bin”, follow [Guide] Clean Dumped Intel Engine (CS)ME/(CS)TXE Regions with Data Initialization on “spi.bin” image and flash “outimage.bin” back via “fptw64 -f outimage.bin” followed by “fptw64 -greset”. If you don’t have read access, follow [Guide] Unlock Intel Flash Descriptor Read/Write Access Permissions for SPI Servicing to find a way to read the contents of the SPI/BIOS chip first before repairing the ME v9.5 firmware within.
Sorry for reviving this old thread, but I never got a chance to get back.
Shortly after the pandemic hit my country, the motherboard of the aforementioned laptop died. However, my brother managed to find a working spare, which was free from any of the anomalies we experienced on the previous board. Not the end I expected, but that’s exactly what happened with the laptop. 