Long story short, the M920q/M920x (Dual-Chip BIOS) has a Embedded Controller onboard which doesn’t allow for properly reading the BIOS Chips. You have to desolder them and read both of them externally. Then its possible to mod it.
With single BIOS like on the M720q it’s no problem reading it off the soldered Mainboard directly.
I wrote a little guide for how to do everything. It still needs some documentation, but i will post it here later.
The only issue i haven’t found a solution to yet is the FPT flashing, i only get ERROR 167 no matter what i try. By disabling FPRR i managed to dump the entire 24MB BIOS via FPT at least.
I read ALL threads about it and haven’t found a solution. (Pinmod fried my poor Audio Chip with a fancy orange glow)
Disabling ‘BD PROCHOT#’ disabled this stupid 800MHz throttle.
Hello everyone and I’m asking for help
I’m not a specialist - can you check in the BIOS that dropped d3vf0x whether there is a block on INSPUR devices, I mean the INSPUR network card with the Intel X540-t2 system, I have 4 of them, they work in other PCs and servers, but I can’t run it on the M920x . In the PC it is detected as Intel. I masked pin 2, various BIOS settings, but nothing. DELL x550-t2 card works properly (newer model).
Lenovo doesn’t like Inspur ;( and maybe it blocked it
this is what the card looks like in lspci, supposedly Intel and Subsytem Inspur
I will be very grateful for your help
05:00.0 Ethernet controller [0200]: Intel Corporation Ethernet Controller 10-Gigabit X540-AT2 [8086:1528] (rev 01)
05:00.1 Ethernet controller [0200]: Intel Corporation Ethernet Controller 10-Gigabit X540-AT2 [8086:1528] (rev 01)
lspci -vvv -s 05:00.
05:00.0 Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation Ethernet Controller 10-Gigabit X540-AT2 (rev 01)
Subsystem: Inspur Electronic Information Industry Co., Ltd. 10G base-T DP EP102Ti3A Adapter
Control: I/O- Mem+ BusMaster+ SpecCycle- MemWINV- VGASnoop- ParErr- Stepping- SERR+ FastB2B- DisINTx+
Status: Cap+ 66MHz- UDF- FastB2B- ParErr- DEVSEL=fast >TAbort- <TAbort- SERR- <PERR- INTx-
Latency: 0, Cache Line Size: 64 bytes
Interrupt: pin A routed to IRQ 16
IOMMU group: 15
This page doesn’t seem to work anymore, is it possible to get a copy somehwhere of this information? I modded one machine using this information and I would like to do another one. Thanks for the work you put into this!
You can manually recover the lenovo stock bios using an USB
Procedure to recover bios M920q:
You take an USB drive, you format it with rufus to FREEDOS and FAT32 https://imgur.com/WopyS6w
After that you have to download the bios from the Lenovo website that says:
USB Drive Package
Extract the contents of the zip into the usb drive
You open the tiny and put the pin in position 2-4,
The pins are located right next to the RJ45 port, the pins are numbered from right to left and bottom to top, you can see the numbers on the board https://imgur.com/a/NH4SAMV
put the USB stick in the tiny’s USB and turn it on, it will take a while.
it should beep 2 times and start a bios update right after that.
I was able to recover an m920q this way with a 32gb usb stick and connected to port 5 (on the right of the hdmi port)
@d3vf0x so i shouldn’ read the chips with ch341 without removing them from the board?
i want to add some microcodes to the bios, any ideas how can i do it?
coffetime would work?
i want to use an BGA 1440 to 1151 CPU, the M2176m one
i have tried to mod the bios by miself but i can’t boot the pc, i receive 3 long 1 short 3 long 1 short beeps that indicate bios corruption
