MSI Raider 78HX 14V laptop Bricked

BIOS/UEFI Modding BIOS Modding Guides and Problems
1

Have no idea about the past of the device. No shorts, CPU coils measure healthy Ohms to ground, as well as GPU.

When connected, starts on its own if the BIOS battery is disconnected. Then, after a minute or less, starts RGB keyboard and light bar, CPU starts warming up and CPU fan kicks in. Screen backlight comes on but no display. After a while turns off and AC adapter (original 330w) turns off and seemingly goes into protection mode.

Now digging in, tried another known good memory module. No change.
Disconnected hard drive, Wifi card, various non essential devices like webcam, touchpad. No change. Battery seems ok. Does charge battery no prob. Charging light also comes in fine.

Removed BIOS chip and dumped BIOS. Tried flashing a (VSCC compatible) BIOS downloaded from MSI website. Same behavior.
Measured BIOS chip activity on CLK and DATA pins. All of them show activity during boot.

Connected to a bench PSU. Now it does not turn off. Actually, the original brick seems to turn off for no reason, my PSU does not show any unreasonable consumption. The PSU graph plot history shows no weird current spikes over such a brick would provide. After connecting to the bench PSU, I could identify reasonable current draws for a boot sequence in such a gaming computer.

Now I am leaning towards a corrupted BIOS, incomplete BIOS in the case of the downloaded one, bad ME region or a bad EC rom. Sadly, I do not have an EC programmer. According to MSI bios update manual (in system) the update process should flash the EC as well.

As you can tell by my questions, I a m a novice with BIOS stuff. But willing to learn. Any help is welcome.

2

What type is this? VIG, VHG, VGG, VFG?

Attach or post a link to your dump and the MSI firmware you flashed.

3

This is the original: Original
This is the same version from MSI website: MSI same version (706)

I am a bit confused about the VIG, VHG, VGG, VFG. Did read the guide but that part was a bit unclear for me.

4

Captura de pantalla 2024-05-25 175320
Captura de pantalla 2024-05-25 175320581×943 15 KB

5

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image1007×351 79.3 KB

6

Seems to be VHG

Nothing obvious in firmware! Static parts of bios region is identical to stock bios, NVRAM looks OK, MEA has no errors, unpacks fine in MEA and opens in FIT.

Since you already tried with a stock MSI firmware there’s nothing left to do here regarding firmware, unfortunately.

7

Yes, it is VHG, thanks for that and for checking the firmware.

What would be the next step you’d take?

8

Take it to a repair shop.

9

I was afraid of reading that.

Do you think there could be a ME region issue or maybe a partial flash before could have caused problems?

10

No

(Assuming you flashed properly but since you were able to read the chip properly…)

11

Can you please elaborate on why not? I have been reading, (learning a lot about all these matters) and trying to understand the details of the situation. Some guides also mention that ME regions can become corrupt on their own and stuff like that.

Is that a ruled out scenario? If it was corrupt ME analyzer wouldn’t identify it?

Thanks for your help, very much appreciated .

12

I did already: