First time here, seems to be the most appropriate place to ask for the help. I have this notebook, and recently, when trying to boot from USB stick, I made changes to BIOS settings in setup (changed to UEFI boot and enabled INT13), and afterwards machine always hangs on Dell logo half cleared from the screen, does not get to setup any more, no response to END key, no response to FN key (disagnostics). It was BIOS A.13.
I disassembled the notebook, removed the chips, read them using programmer, and played with images. There’re two chips - Q16 (2MB) and Q64 (8MB). It appeared that problem is in Q64 chip. I found A.08 BIOS version on the internet, and machine works now.
BUT! After second power on and on it displays “ME is in recovery state…” and whatever I do it always says so.
I tried upgrading/downgrading, loaded special executables to flash ME separately, it always comes to the state displaying this message.
Here’s the great guide on your website, but I have problems with it:
1. the original defective image I open has no ME region loaded into the FITC, and BIOS area is also 0. I tried with A.08 image I downloaded from internet, and it also has similar problems.
2. When creating output image the tool creates 16MB ROM file instead of 8MB ROM file, and, what’s interesting, if I put created image into FITC, it fails to load.
The best course of action to fix my problem would be to just reset setup settings in my original faulty BIOS (if settings are the problem), and I will write it back to the chips and continue working on original version.
Please advise/help.
Update: good news, machine does not power off in 30 minutes under Win 10 as may happen when ME has troubles.
Update: after exploring the “Wizard” I figured out that these two chips form the single BIOS space; I appended 8MB file with 2MB file and now fitc reads reads image without errors.
Update: re-build of the original image throws error - “configuration parameter size mismatch”. Replacing files ony by one in Decomp subdir figured out that the cause is “ME Region.bin”. Replaced the binary with the one from the repository, and now image builds without errors. Time to flash it and see if it will ever start the machine.
Update: replacing ME region only causes system to behave exactly the same way as I said at the beginning: it is stuck at BIOS logo, thus the corrupt was actually not the ME which caused error during build. Then I replaced BIOS region, and now it boots properly. So far no “ME in recovery state” messages.
Update: BIOS updated to the latest version, works properly. In conclusion - the stupidest problem was that I was feeding only a part of BIOS/firmware image because I was loading them in parts physically reading the chips by standalone programmer. Tehcnical problem was in two places: in ME region (that’s why error message), and in BIOS region (hanging after completion of POST).
"configuration parameter size mismatch"
I met this error too.But it was that I first throw the file into the FITc and it will prompt it.
MOBO:Asrock B75M-ITX
bios version:2.00