I have L460 Type 20FV (2 X 8MB bios chips) with no boot issue presumably after BIOS update (black screen with restarts, common issue on this model after BIOS update) bought in the US.
1. I made a dump of the corrupted? BIOS, cleaned ME region, ME analyzer states it’s “configured”, after flash - still no boot. Could it be, that some other (f.e. BIOS region) got corrupted and the issue is not in ME region? Attached are the original and cleaned images.
2. Then I took a cleaned dump from some other machine of the same model shared on forums and was able to boot absolutely fine, no delays, etc…, but there is an exclamation mark in the device manager for the LAN card right after fresh OS installation - LAN naturally doesn’t work. Another notice: for some reason windows shows it fails to start LAN i219-LM, while isn’t it supposed to be i219-V(2) version of the NIC in Windows 10 Pro? MEA Analyzer states “Corporate LP”, if it matters.
3. Then I replaced “GBE region” in the good dump from the step2 with my original GBE region be means of intel flash tools. I’v got my MAC address back, but the NIC still does not start with symptoms described in the previous step.
Try this firmware, it’s you old bios recovered. Seems that Lenovo for this machine writes a PEI volume into the large padding between EC firmware and NVRAM for the update, but this process didn’t finish. Original bios is quite old, didn’t find a completely identical firmware and bios region was partly updated already, too. So in the end I put NVRam and EVSA store back in a stock bios and updated and refreshed/cleaned ME (which stores the MAC address after initialisation). In addition the files you used had a difference in ME config, might be relevant.
lfb6
The attached fixed image did the trick - laptop booted just fine with working LAN.
BTW: it’s indeed i219-LM version, no question sign anymore in device manager.
Now I’m trying to catch what you did to fix the original corrupted dump, because I have 2 more L460 in similar state - no boot after BIOS update.
You state, that ME and GBE regions are likely good and that’s BIOS region got corrupted - could you briefly describe steps taken to fix/replace the corrupted region?
The latter might not be necesssary, but the ME firmware in the original dump was very old.
Normally the EC firmware will get transfered from it’s place within bios region to the EC controller. Can you check the status screen for EC firmware version and post the result, please?
Dump those other firmwares and post an image of the structure with bios region expanded and parser output visible in the lower tab. This way one might see if it’s the same error for all machines…
There are plenty of steps to recover BIOS region and not that straightforward like ME cleaning procedure.
It does not look like a doable fix for one-off case. But thank you for details, they might help someone in similar situation.
Here is a screen from the good recovered machine/BIOS:
Actually I already flashed the fixed dump on these 2 machines - they both booted with no LAN issue. AS far as I understand the only drawback of this fast recovery is wrong DMI and other serials?
I’d recommend updating to R08ET71W - this should update both bios region and EC firmware to latest version.
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Thanks for the images, seems the bios update got stuck at the same point for all three machines!
And yes, it’s correct, that the FD and ME (from the file I did send, meaning not initialized) should work fine for all other machines, too, no machine specific information there.
You should however keep your GbE region (3 times same MAC in a network will give trouble) and you might want to restore at least your Windows OEM license (EVSA store):
Extract as is the GbE and the EfiSystemNvDataFvGuid volume in bios region from the two corrupt dumps- use UEFIToolNE since it gives a better overview over the structure and naming is different in UEFITool:
Then replace as is GbE and first EFI volume in bios region (FFF12B8D-7696-4C8B-A985-2747075B4F50) in (copies of) the fixed dump - such generating machine specific dumps again. That requires UEFITool (0.28 or 0.25 should work both)
3 restored, updated and properly working L460 Congratulations
Regarding the other item:
I’d say let’s keep knowledge in the forum so that it’s accessible for everyone- just create a new thread with the next issue?!
Congratulations 