Hey Plutomaniac (And Everyone Else),
I have a few problems and questions and was hoping you can help.
I have an m18xR1 laptop, and I was able to create a modded BIOS (started with svl7’s unlocked A05), and was able to mod it with the latest Intel OpRom for my machine (12.9.0). That upgrade worked flawlessly for me. I then upgraded my Intel ME from 7.0 to 7.1.80 - that worked perfectly, too! However, I want to flash my bios again because I found upgraded MICROCODE for the system, but here is where I’m worried.
Mr Fox was kind enough to try my mod, BUT, he flashed the intel ME region first and then the BIOS mod I did. His ME region is not showing any version - he tried from within the bios to do the ME FW RE-FLASH option and that didn’t work, sadly. He tried the Fpt64, fwupdate, etc… and they didn’t work either. Can I use the STOCK bios flash utility that dell gives (and their A05 stock bios file or my modded a05 bios) and edit the INI file to force flash the ME region? If so, I believe it needs an .FD extention, and the flashed ME file we used is a .bin extension.
So, do you know any way that I can get this fixed for mr fox?
Also, how would I do a BIOS upgrade / update, and not have the problem that MR FOX has, since I want to upgrade my bios with the new microcode.
Thanks in advance, and I’m happy to pay you if you can help us out!
Thanks,
Swick
Alright, the SPI image that you created had an updated ME by you. What procedure did you follow to update it and then apply OEM (Dell) settings? Did you dump your SPI image and then shared it or was the ME update/configuration based on Dell’s own A5 latest SPI image? If you used a ME dump then it’s very likely that another user (even of the same model) will have issues due to leftovers inside the ME Region which are meant for your specific system. Check Section A in this recent guide of mine to understand what I mean exactly.
Your questions are related to your own and another system so I need answers for both when it comes to the following. Is the SPI Flash Descriptor locked or unlocked? Check quickly either via fpt -dumplock command (CPU & ME should report 00 00 FF FF) or via fpt -d me.bin -me which should not show any error (like 26 for example) and dump the ME region inside the SPI chip. For the other broken system, can he boot into the operating system or is the platform not even posting? Meaning, is the ME bricked or just corrupted on some extend?
The .fd SPI image file that Dell provides is nothing more than a 0x20000 header + normal Intel SPI image of 32Mbit (4MB). First though, we need to know the above.