Hi @Lost_N_BIOS
System was not bootable. I rebuilt 8MB chip in post above : http://s000.tinyupload.com/?file_id=05792422551815497658
With the rebuilt chip, it boots and ME (half) works too, no ethernet.
The FD is in the 8 MB chip, not the 4 MB. I believe the FD is incorrect, and that causes no ethernet.
I shall dump again (although I’ve flashed A18 with the exe, still no luck).
I noticed a type, this is a Dell 9020M, not 9200M.
Thanks,
Alex
I do not need anything you rebuilt, I could rebuild 8MB chip myself, that is not my concern here.
Yes, sorry for mixup on the FD location if I had it backwards, either way you wrote over it with step #3 in first port. Do not dump again, not needed.
FD is NOT in 8MB chip, at least not in the dump you sent me (unless corrupted, I didn’t search), but yes it does belong there. Actually, just looked and the 8MB dump you sent contains the ME at beginning (for 6MB), as expected, due to what you did at step #3 above (So FD overwritten as mentioned as well as GbE too)
And yes, sorry, I noticed that type too when I tagged those guys, fixed thanks 
GbE is where MAC Address is stored, this is why no Internet via Ethernet - You wrote over FD/GbE and some of ME and then partially into original BIOS region
Thanks for your help.
I’ve been trying to write GbE Mac Address, no luck so far.
I think it’s not as bad as we think. The original ME is ~6 MB, the one I overwrote is ~1.5 MB.
So the overwritten area is FD, GbE, and ~1.5MB of ME.
~4.5 MB of the original ME is still there.
I noticed something regarding Ethernet. If I take CMOS out, let ME discharge, and power up from cold, the green link comes one.
After the initial fan spin, I think ME tries to access the GbE and then link is gone.
Do you know if ME is married to the MAC address? I put some random MAC address, no luck.
Thanks,
Alex
You’re welcome! Please stop tinkering around in there, wait for me to help to fix this GbE MAC is easy to fix, once you write in GbE region 
Yes, really only missing FD, because GbE is included in original HDR and we can extract. Once I have proper FD for this model, I can rebuild your entire BIOS in few minutes, and keep all board specifics (serial etc) in place
LAN would power on during BIOS rom loading, and yes, maybe ME tries to access too, but none of that matters, no GbE region (or wrong MAC ID) = no Ethernet.
Just wait, someone I tagged will send me FD, or dumps, then I’ll have you fixed BIOS right after that 
Even once GbE is there, you cannot put in random MAC address, it must be exact correct one. So you need to give me that off board sticker.
Look or LAN metal port (look on top, bottom, sides etc), if no sticker then MAC ID will be on board sticker, check side of 24pin, top/bottom sides of PCI/PCIE slots, and then all stickers on board
This system has ~5MB ME FW, not 1.5MB, so that is another incorrect thing I didn’t notice you did at first post too
We might have a show stopper. I’ve looked everywhere. Took MB out, looked at stickers everywhere.
Nothing that looks like a MAC address. Hopefully your rebuilt BIOS can make the GbE work.
Regards,
Alex
@alex0 - Show me images of all stickers maybe it’s one one and you don’t notice, and be sure you looked all around/ON the LAN metal block, sometimes it hides on the bottom of that (towards PCIE slot). Look on back of board too, and also look on base of case, inside door of case, bottom of case etc.
It may be in BIOS, I’ve not dug around yet. But really, to find, I need to see all stickers from your board too, so I can see serial, or service/asset tag and use that to try and locate copy of MAC if stored as info/copy outside of GBE (sometimes is, sometimes not)
If you used this system recently too, and used it’s ethernet, you may be able to find MAC in router logs, if you can identify which MAC is this system.
I cannot make Ethernet work without correct original MAC ID
@Lost_N_BIOS - I took these. The router was a great idea!, but the logs are only for the last day 
.
I was actually thinking of ringing Dell "My MAC address got deleted because of a bad BIOS flash. What was the original MAC address?"
Think that would work?
@alex0 - If they have your purchase details, and you give them the asset/service tag info, then yes, they may be able to tell you the MAC ID
But, this is a legal area, so they may not be able to discuss MAC ID’s with you, you know, laws and all that but it’s worth a shot. Wait until I look at all these images, I may spot it
Please put all those images into a max compressed zi[/rar/7zip - thanks, I’m on limited internet.
No stickers on bottom of case, what about back of case where I/O ports are?
I have uploaded the pictures.
I recompressed them to be as small as possible because of your limited internet.
http://s000.tinyupload.com/?file_id=00768111920248123739
Thanks.
NO MAC Address shown on anything there, looks like they maybe removed stickers when it was repurposed.
The only thing you can do, if you cannot find MAC address in any logs, or old sent email source view, it’s get a USB LAN adapter, or find one that will work in those M.2 slots.
Are you sure you do not have ANY backups of the BIOS or chips before you did the ME Write attempt at post #1?
Wow, I am surprised no one has replied yet with dump for us, hopefully someone will soon so we can fix!
I know Sleinous has one for sure, so as soon as he comes back in here I’m sure he’ll send dump our way
Yea, so it’s not my eyesight. I thought my 4 eyes 
were not enough.
I can use a USB if it goes to that.
I do not have any backups. I read that flashing ME is impossible to brick. The flasher checks for compatibility and will refuse to flash if it’s not compatible. And even if ME is corrupted, it won’t brick. You can still POST, just no ME.
So I thought, ok, no risk then. 
It’s a big job to take out SMD hot air, desolder chips and install on programmer, and since there was no risk, why do it?
Turns out, there is risk.
Just going to jump in quickly in regards to the MAC address.
You may be able to recover the MAC address from the Windows registry once you get the system to boot as long as you don’t do a winsock reset or attempt to uninstall/re-install the ethernet adapter.
@alex0 - Nothing is impossible to brick 
And corrupted ME can cause any number of things, failing ME status, any number of random issues while ME still looks to be functioning, or completely bricked system and no boot - there is no one specific thing when ME FW has failed, other than it’s failed and then you deal with the outcome.
Your ME FW isn’t bricked here, the BIOS as a whole is just trashed, FD missing and Incorrect SKU STOCK RGN not configured for this system partially programmed in over half the actual ME FW
And the method you flashed is the MOST easiest and risky way to flash and brick the BIOS or ME FW, FPT if allowed to write to ME region does not check anything, it programs in what you give it.
Only ME FW update tool does the things you mentioned, and if you had used that it would not have let you flash due to incorrect SKU ME FW, but once you tried using the correct SKU it would have accepted and been OK with Stock RGN because it will configure in the settings during it’s update process.
Only ME FW update tool does this, not FPT
Sorry, not sure what you are talking or asking about desoldering stuff in regards to? Chip can be programmed in place with SOIC8 test clip.
@chinobino - Thanks, can you tell him how to do that, and can that be done by putting the HDD/SSD into another system (with it’s Ethernet disabled first)?
BTW, someone asked something similar about UUID, and I said I didn’t think so, can that be gathered as well, from disk put into another system - Asus Rog Notebook BIOS Bricked
@chinobino - I thought that was a great idea. Google showed: https://smallbusiness.chron.com/mac-addr…stry-56773.html
So I mounted the drive in my hackintosh, copied C:\Windows\System32\config\system* and opened it in a windows 10 VM.
Please see image attached. I don’t seem to see MAC address there unfortunately.
@Lost_N_BIOS - In regards to SOIC8 test clip, I got burned once. Technically, from an electronics perspective, it’s actually dangerous to do in-circuit programming via clip. Electronics 101. The reason is with standard CMOS electronics, you have Inputs (SCLK, MOSI, MISO etc). As part of design, we make sure that these signals never exceed VCC by a standard diode drop (0.6V). So the other side of the chip (PCH in our case) should have input diode protection tied to VCC.
If you send signals into the flash chip, they travel down to the PCH as well. If the PCH is unpowered, and your signals exceed 0.6V, you can damage the inputs of the PCH.
I tried in circuit flashing once (not a PCH, but a SATA USB board firmware dump/upgrade). Killed the bridge chip inputs. The chip never read the flash firmware anymore and I had to replace the bridge chip. Good thing the chip had built-in firmware if it can’t read the external flash ROM. Either way, the default firmware had bugs so I had to replace the chip.
A modern PCH is a BGA chip, and replacing that would be hard with my current tools. So being a proper EE, I learnt my lesson, and don’t try in circuit flashing nowadays. I’m sure many people do, and get away with it. Just technically, it’s not supposed to be done. You learn that in 3rd year EE at uni. The one time I tried was the one time I killed something.
@alex0 Depending on which OS you are using the MAC address can be in different locations and sometimes in more than one location.
For Windows 8.x / Windows 10 / Windows Server 2012 / 2016 / 2019 you can search the registry for two 32-bit strings that combined will give you your 48-bit MAC address
1. BIMacAddress_h contains the first four alphanumeric characters of the MAC address in the form of 0x00000000h
Mine is 0x0000001Fh, so the first four alphanumeric characters of the MAC address are 00-1F
The brand of my motherboard is EVGA which has a MAC address vendor prefix of “00-1F-BC”
[Edit] For Dell this prefix will be different could be one of these.
For Intel this prefix could be one of these.
2. BIMacAddress_l contains the last 8 alphanumeric characters of the MAC address in the form of 0x00000000h
The first 2 characters belong to the MAC address vendor prefix, so for my motherboard both ethernet controllers have the EVGA MAC address vendor prefix of “00-1F-BC"
Where BC is the first two characters of BIMacAddress_l e.g. BC-xx-xx-xx
I am not going to post the rest of my MAC address here for obvious security reasons but if you have the BIMacAddress_l key present you should be able to see the remaining 6 alphanumeric characters of the MAC address that are unique to that ethernet adapter.
Search the entire registry for both of the keys (BIMacAddress_h, BIMacAddress_l) as they can be stored under “ControlSet001” (from a previous Windows session), “CurrentControlSet” (your current Windows session) and sometimes “NetworkDriverBackup” (from previous driver installations).
For Windows 7 / Server 2008 you can search the registry for “Network Address” and it should be under “CurrentControlSet”.
Your first boot after the MAC adress was erased is your best chance to get it, after that Windows may update the registry (on log-off or shutdown) and overwrite/remove the previously stored entries at “ControlSet001” and “CurrentControlSet”, with the exception of “NetworkDriverBackup” which may be deleted by using 'Disk clean-up”.
@Lost_N_BIOS If you boot that Windows installation on other hardware with any ethernet adapter not disabled in BIOS you can overwrite the registry keys for “CurrentControlSet” and potentially for “ControlSet001”.
Note that disabling the ethernet adapter in BIOS may cause Windows to start it’s diagnostics due to no network being found so you’d want to make sure you don’t start the network troubleshooter in case it resets the network stack (and winsock in the process).
If you must boot that Windows installation on other hardware do it in safe mode without networking enabled.
To start Windows 10 / Server 2016 / 2019 in safe mode use a Windows 10 setup DVD or USB memory stick and the Command Prompt (“Repair your computer” → “Troubleshoot” → “Advanced options” → “Command Prompt”)
Inside the Command Prompt window, type the command;
bcdedit /set {default} safeboot minimal
and
bcdedit /deletevalue {default} safeboot
to revert
In regards to the Windows UUID, I have just googled a lot on this and have come to the same conclusion - the original UUID can’t be retrieved by swapping the drive into another machine as the system drive.
If the manufacturer was the same and the motherboard was the same model there is a small chance that it could be the same if the vendor was lazy and didn’t fill in all the SMBIOS data (or just duplicated it) but Asus usually is not lazy.
It would possibly easier to edit/ read the registry offline without booting the complete system. Install the disk in another system/ via USB adapter as an additional disk, and load the desired registry hive for offline registry editing/ reading as described for example here: http://smallvoid.com/article/winnt-offline-registry-edit.html
- Do a backup of the registry files first, don’t work on the original files
- Don’t forget to unload the loaded hive from your regstry after reading!
@chinobino - I tried looking again. There are no BIMacAddress entries. I googled a bit and I think the BIMacAddress only exist for Atheros Ethernet drivers. The Intel ones do not seem to have them.
@alex0 - So what do you want to do, carry on and fix BIOS without Ethernet MAC ID? If yes, OK, but sorry I’m still waiting for a dump from one of these systems, hopefully one of the users I tagged will reply soon, especially Sleinous, I’m sure he’ll be back in soon.
@alex0 Try looking into HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\DeviceContainers The last element of some GUID- entries there is the MAC address for 2 Win10 1909 machines (Realtek) and a server 2016 ess. (Intel).
Might be dynamic entries, didn’t try with loading a remote registry.
BIMacAddress_* seems to come from older machines
@lfb6 - I did have a look, mainly they were USB devices. No sign of the MAC address.
@Lost_N_BIOS - Please just fix BIOS if possible without the MAC address. Thanks.