Noname chinese motherboard ME not working.

Special Topics Intel Management Engine
1

Good day,

Recently i’ve bought a noname chinese LGA2011 M/B named Kllisre X79H v1.1.

After installing and testing everything seemed to work fine, except:

“sleep mode” was vanished from Windows10 OS menu.

I started to dig into and found:

- That M/B have H81/C220 chipset (nothing about X79, sic), no UMA onboard.
- No “Intel management engine” device in OS, so unable to install driver.
- command “powercfg /a” tells that S0/S1/S2/S3 modes are not supported by the platform.
- BIOS options that are related to S3 state and overall ACPI behavior doesn’t affect OS behavior.
*that, in sum, made me think about ME problem.
- There is no information about Intel ME in BIOS, not a single word.
- “MEInfo -fwsts” tell me the platform is unsupported.

What i did:

1. Dumped the SPI with DOS FPT. My luck - there was no write-protection, so i’ve got full image (8mb).
2. checked it with MEAnalyzer, which respond that image contain ME FW 1,5mb, and seems like all is OK with it.
pic

MEanalyzer.png


3. Using AMIBCP i've made ME options visible in BIOS menu, but it showed me N/A. (i seen exactly same behavior in THAT THREAD)
4. Following the guide here about cleaning and re-inserting ME region to the image i've built the image and succesfully flashed it with DOS FPT twice(for sure) with following -greset and removing the CMOS battery and "restoring defaults" and all that necessary stuff after flashing.
Unfortunately, with no luck.

Now:
- BIOS shows ME version as N/A
- "MEInfo -fwsts" shows that ME present

meinfo.png


- SPI dump in attachment

I think here's something with BIOS<->FW communication, considering that flashing was successful, MEinfo says FW is not corrupted, but init still unfinished.

Pls, help to solve the issue..

backup.zip (3.43 MB)

2

Guys? Maybe some advice of where to dig?

3

When it comes to these weird Chinese mobos, the BIOS is often the problem. All you can do Engine-wise is to clean its firmware by following [Guide] Clean Dumped Intel Engine (CS)ME/(CS)TXE Regions with Data Initialization on the system’s SPI/BIOS dump. If the problem persists, it is BIOS and not Engine related.

4

Thank you for replying.



Did it already. No luck, unfortunately…

I’m read about BIOS problem too, but nowhere found the reason… All points of view meet at "it’s disabled somehow", but HOW? :slight_smile:

And I’m wondering why MEInfo shows me "normal" state and what does it mean "M3_ICV_RECOVERY" (right now i have a thought this might be some HW disabling, cause i saw M3 in power-management-related context… maybe just a hidden test-point, which needs to be short… as a sort of guess)

5

Some of these Chinese no-name "manufacturers" disable the ME through the BIOS because the "customer cannot find drivers" or similar stupid reasons, probably through hidden BIOS options (UEFI NVARs).