Help restoring correct bios to Strix Z370-I motherboard

BIOS/UEFI Modding BIOS modules (PCI ROM, EFI and others)
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Hi all,

First time posting here but I’m at loss and this is the only place I could think of that might be able to help.

I recently bricked my MB by making a very stupid error and manually updating the BIOS for a Z270-I (yes I know, I went by memory without checking anything… :frowning: ). There is no BIOS flashback button on the MB and it only supports the CrashFree3 BIOS updating when the BIOS is corrupted, which it is not, so I only get a CPU error LED on the MB and nothing on the screen. Can’t access the BIOS or do anything at ALL!

To try and ix the problem I went ahead and got a CH341A external BIOS flashing device and managed to hook it up to the MB and read the BIOS perfectly (and indeed, inspecting the BIOS in a HEX reader it is the Z270-I BIOS). The next step was to try and flash the correct Z370-I BIOS, which I got off the ASUS webpage link to bios.

The problem is, this file is 4kB too large - flashrom gave me this error: Image size (16779264 B) doesn’t match the flash chip’s size (16777216 B). Reading a bit more, and inspecting the new BIOS with a HEX reader, it seems like there is some additional data in the .CAP file which looks like XML tags </ > type strings which I couldn’t find in the BIOS I dumped from the chip. I understood I would have to ‘clean’ it up, but I have no idea what parts exactly to remove and how to edit in HEX without destroying it.

Any help would be really really appreciated! I’m desperate to get this system back up and running.

Thanks a lot!

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Use UEFI tool to extract the Intel image from the CAPSULE, the saved BIN is the file to program.

Regarding the motherboard original data (UUID, MAC, SN), its probably lost unless you have a backup before the 270 flash, you may look the current dump if there’s any correspondent matched data on it.

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First of all, thanks a lot for the response! Please bear with me, I’m very new to BIOS and embedded software in general.

I have used UEFI tool and extracted 4 files, BIOS, Descriptor, GbE and ME. The BIOS file is significantly smaller (14155776 B) with the other 3 combined being he size I mentioned before. I also do not have a backup before I made the error of flashing the wrong BIOS, and I’m really unsure how to locate that data on the dumped BIOS I copied from the MB.

I’m still not sure how I put together a suitable binary to flash onto the chip, and even if I do, from what I understood, unless I can restore the MB’s original data it won’t really function properly?

If you have any suggestions on how I should proceed I would be really grateful. I’m happy to do some research and reading if pointed in he right direction, but keep in mind this is very outside of my skillset.

Thanks again!

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