[Help] Acer an 517-54 bios image way larger than IC!

[rwonke]

A couple of weeks back, I bricked my Acer motherboard attempting to disable FPT and bios lock, I’ve been trying to repair it for the past while, I made a post earlier where someone ran my bios dump file through ME analyzer and it output “error in EFS partition”. I have a 16mb chip, but the bios update file came from an exe, no problem, I extracted the exe using 7-zip and had 3 .fd files. The FD files had the same name but at the end of each was different. GH5XGx64_TI.fd, GH5XGx64_RTK.fd, GH5XGx64_NoPD.fd . I retrieved from the manufacturers website seems to be a whole 21mb. I have no idea how to resize it to work with my flasher. Any help appreciated…

Heres the site: https://www.acer.com/us-en/support/product-support/Nitro_AN517-54

[lfb6]

Now that’s the third thread you open on this machine? How to extract the firmware image was explained to you 6 days ago already!

Look the last two pictures which show starting and ending of the firmware image.

When you look the pic of 7-zip you could read the probable version of your own firmware, it’s 1.17

@lfb6

Reinitializing an ME is described in this guide:

Guide-How To: Clean Dumped Intel Engine (CS)ME/(CS)TXE Regions with Data Initialization Last Updated: 2020-07-22 This guide is relevant to those who need to clean the DATA section of an Engine (CSME, ME, CSTXE, TXE) Region, which is part of a dumped SPI/BIOS image, in order to flash the latter on a different machine of the same OEM model. It is not meant as a guide on how to completely transform a dumped Engine region into a stock Intel-provided one. Although the guide can be used for that some…

Transfering a complete region or volume is done by UEFITool/UEFIToolNE, it’s described quite often here, do some reading.

Your bios version isn’t 1.11. For extracting 7-zip is good enough:

The fd files contain a complete image, packed in by some sigs and flashing tools in beginning and end. Search for iflash / _IFLASH_BIOSIMG in HxD.

Which version to use we had some posts before:

@lfb6

I’d recommend cleaning/reinitializing ME and emptying NVRam volume in bios region or replacing ME region and NVRAM EFI volume with thecorresponding ME- region and NVRAM EFI- volume from a stock bios (uninitialized / from vendor!). Your variant is an a little older ‘GH5XGx64_NoPD’, code parts are identical to stock.

@rwonke

I’ve been trying for days and honestly gave up. If anyone can help me by building me a working image I’d be really greatful

I suggest instead of trying ‘for days’ that you might want to present some (preliminary) results and / or ask some more precise questions?

[rwonke]

Listen man, idk if I mentioned this or not but I’m new to this kinda thing. Now what I’m asking is what do the things in the end of the file name mean? Which didn’t happen to be answered. I’ve also had trouble for a while due to the laptop not booting. I understand I did a mistake, but I’m asking for help

[Arc717]

download HxD hex editor and use it to read that .fd file and copy the block that guy sent you exactly, and dump that into a new file. That is your bios image. Here’s a youtube tutorial for how to do it for an alienware: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMHTi23VxO0

You also may need to flash an EC chip if you have one.

When you’re done right click the file and select properties, screenshot that and send it in, so someone can verify the byte size.

[lfb6]

@rwonke

GH5XGx64_TI.fd, GH5XGx64_RTK.fd, GH5XGx64_NoPD.fd

@rwonke

Now what I’m asking is what do the things in the end of the file name mean? Which didn’t happen to be answered

Seem to be different hardware configurations, TI and RTK have for example Thuderbolt enabled in ME configuration, No_PD doesn’t.

The only way to find the correct version is a bytewise comparison of ones own dump and the corresponding stock/vendor firmware in the corresponding version in HxD (if one doesn’t have sufficient information from manufacturer).