I found a bios mod for a Alienware 17 R1 Ranger (M17x R5) from link to bios on Archive.org and after updating my bios to A17 from Dells site, I foolishly tried running the bios mod I downloaded from archive.org without reading ALL the instructions and to make it worst, I renamed the included file “Microcode_Intel_Intel_microcode.bin” to bios.bin to make the command on the readme file “fptw64 -f bios.bin -bios” work. Well, it flashed the 20kb and after I rebooted my laptop, I know get the single beep and no boot. I am about to give up but decided to try this forum. If you know of a way to perform a bios recovery that would be helpful. I tried asking ChatGPT and it led me to downloading the exe file and putting it into a USB slot and pressing CTRL-ESC but that didn’t do anything. Any other way to recover the BIOS? Thanks, in advanced!
Edit by Fernando: Thread title customized
Where is the Dell link for the machine model, is there any full SPI dump before the foolish flash mod, if any…?
No dumps, no original machine data and only a full hardware program of the IC, with a fixed Dell image from A17 file
Here is the machine model Support for Alienware 17 | Drivers & Downloads | Dell US . Unfortunately, no dumps of any kind. I did flash it to A17 (it was at A14 prior) before performing the mod flash. I did write to the mod creator as well in case he has any ideas. I have never used a programmer to flash . I’ll need to find some tutorials on youtube.
No backups whatsoever…that’s a damm shame and a foolish action when endeavoring in such mods…
There’s no other ways without a programmer, here’s the A17 file
VAS00X64fd_cut.rar (3.3 MB) to programming.
Agreed. Question, if I did have a backup, how would one go about restoring it? I did find a bin file on the archive.org post as well. It is a 4MB file. https://archive.org/download/17r1biosmod
If you did, i would explain how…no point, in current status.
The bios mod on Web archive it’s probably machine data empty, i’m not going to lose my time checking further, if the user share’s it, it’s his problem, and it’s probably a shared bios region, not a full working image with all regions (8192kb) including FD and ME FW.
Thats all, good luck.
I would appreciate knowing how to backup and restore a bios since I will likely buy the same machine again on ebay and sell this one for parts.
The system can be restored by Dell indications with USB, as long as the original machine bios structure corruption is at a certain degree… when an IC is flashed with 20kb instead of 8Mb, for sure no regular OEM regular methods will work.
Backups can be made with an hardware programmer connected directly to the IC or by software (InsydeH2O), Intel FPT tool v9 is also an alternative sice its an Intel platform.
Further reading about Intel tools and ME FW Engine related:
Intel (Conv.Sec.) Management Engine: Drivers, Firmware and Tools (2-15) - Special Topics / Intel Management Engine - Win-Raid Forum