my ME firmware was updated to whatever is the latest for 7.x that’s included in the softpaq
it uncompressed all the files in a folder called c:/swsetup/sp82644
In the uncompressed folder, I can see
update.bat
me_flash/8.1.7.xxx.bin
me_flash/linux-win/fw-something-something64.exe (I’ll refer to this app as flash.exe below)
When I try to manually run the flash.exe on an elevated command prompt,
With the ME motherboard jumper set to enabled, I get an 8727 error from the flash.exe (Error 8727: Firmware update tool failed to get the firmware parameters)
With the ME motherboard jumper set to disabled, I get a 8913 error from flash.exe (Error 8193: Intel (R) ME Interface : Cannot locate ME device driver)
With the ME motherboard jumper set to disabled, I get an error (or exclamation mark) on the Intel ME device in Device Manager.
In all cases, AMT (which I believe is related to Intel ME?) is set to enabled.
When running flash.exe, I tried with and without “-generic”. It makes no difference to the error I received.
You cannot perform such an upgrade yourself. The BIOS must be compatible as well. Apply the latest HP BIOS for your model and if it upgrades to ME 8, you are good.
How about using something like uefitool? Would that work? Or maybe replacing the ME portion of my current firmware from a firmware with the latest version?
Thanks
(My firmware is already the latest and the firmware updater didn’t update the ME portion.)
No, you’ll need an updated BIOS region as well, not just ME. If the latest HP BIOS has ME 8 and is a full SPI image, you could try re-flashing the entire chip via a programmer or via Flash Programming Tool (provided that you have read/write access to the SPI chip through software via a jumper or similar). You may lose some board-specific info stored in the BIOS region that way though (such as serial numbers etc.) so always keep a backup of the previous SPI image just in case you want to roll back.
Well it depends. For such an old system, it probably doesn’t matter but playing it safe is a good practice. The BIOS NVRAM could hold Serial Numbers, Windows key, Battery/OS info etc. Some systems (usually newer laptops) may use that info for attestation (verify/recognize a given system and allow or deny certain “premium” features). Other systems may simply show an annoying error at boot that they are not provisioned (HP tends to do that, for example). Anyway, it probably won’t matter in your case.
A full Intel SPI image consists (at least) of Flash Descriptor, (CS)ME and BIOS regions.
I opened the dumped and downloaded BIOS in UEFITool. I can see some differences between the 2 like the GbE, Description region and etc. Would it be ok to “extract as is” these regions from the dumped BIOS and replaced the corresponding region from the downloaded version?
Both the dumped and downloaded bios are 3.96. Thank you.
If you have a programmer, you can try whatever you like. For example, if the BIOS before and after are of the same (latest) version, try “extract as is” and “replace as is” for the ME region only and flash back to see if it works.
I am on the same boat here, trying to update the V1 version of the Z420 (Boot Block date 2011 and ME 7.1.x) to support Ivy-Bridge CPUs. Only V2 versions (Boot Block date 2013, ME 8.1.x) support the newer CPUs. HP provides the single BIOS bin image, for all Z420/620/820 models, but Boot Block does not get updated with their normal BIOS updating procedure. ME gets incremental updates, but not from ME 7 to ME 8.
There was a guide posted here. It is basically instructions to replace both the boot-block, and ME regions, as you suggested, with contents copied from the official BIOS image (two simple block replacement, using HxD tool). Then flash the modified image to the chip through a flash programmer.
I followed the instruction, using a Raspeery Pi 3B+ (as hardware SPI programmer, also recommended in the same guide), and updated the BIOS. Results: system booted up successfully with V2 Xeons. BUT, I got “ME is in manufacturing mode” msg displayed during booting. Other than that, everything appears to be working.
Now, my question to you: how to fix this “ME in manufacturing mode”? My guess the custom settings in ME 7.1.x never got transferred to ME 8.1.x.