I bought about 10 x HP EliteBook 840 G3s to onsell.
I cloned a drive from one of them to the others but it had an older bios hence the other systems booted and performed a downgrade.
Then I got errors such as “SPI Flash Lock”, and further ran into issues where I either can’t update the ME Firmware and also on most with issues, I can’t even use MEInfo to retrieve data.
The board has two flash chips :
Has the FD, Intel ME, GBE and BIOS regions.
Has the EC region.
I have tried opening access by using a programmer and am successful in flashing. I have flashed a bare bios region, ME region, GBE region and a fully opened FD region genersted with Intel FIT but the EC chip or something appears to be rewriting the values.
I have the HP tools like NbDmiFit-2.0A and a whole bunch of other stuff I have tried or know but not off the top of my head.
My main goals are to :
Get rid of the server icon/square that shows on boot (ChatGPT said it was Intel CIRA related, It appeared after the bios downgrade accident)
Make it so I can flash the latest ME firmware updates again.
I can provide more information, I’d really just like some guidance as it has been days now and I really want these to be sale-able and not just deadweights.
I had a read of the article, I have done about half of what was written in the article but the other half where it actually goes into transferring configuration from the stock dump to the new one and making sure it is configured and not initialised I haven’t done.
However my concern is that my original dump will be the point of having issues and also my second 8MB EC chip holds the values, actually I think it ‘hashes’ the id values and checks to see if they’re the same and if not recovers them.
Even if I clean the image as shown in the guide I am expressing doubt here that it will fix my issue.
Will it allow me to reconfigure the system to allow read and write access to Intel ME (Currently I can’t run the update package for the ME or ME Info to even check the values).
I need to remove the irritating visual curse that appears on every boot (square with dashes in it representing a server I think)
In summary will that actually fix my issues or is it just a method to clean and reflash a clean Intel ME and port ID + config data over from the original dump?
Sir… you have 10 (9) systems to work with… you go for it or u DONT, your call not mine.
Whats the issue of at least give it a try on 1 system??? You only have to gain with this…not loose right…or im i wrong???
For starters…what you did in the first place is a VERY UNPROFESSIONAL task with an HP system with Sure Start, you do NOT do such action with a running factory image and not even updated or OS system, you dont have such images for clonning as in factory output.
The linked posts/threads have the info related to DMI/Original system data recover/edit.
I didnt even ask for MB ID, current bios version or system ID/SN numbers…
MB ID and bios version should at least be provided…
@Ahurasim
This thread has been closed by me today. Reason:
This Forum offers free support for private users, who have a Windows or BIOS problem with their own device. We do not spend our free time for dealers, who are going to cheat the customers of their products (your kind of BIOS modding is neither appropriate nor acceptable for the future users).
As a reseller of used HP laptops you should better ask the HP Support for professional help. I am pretty sure, that the Company HP will be enthusiastic about your specific kind of manipulating the BIOS chip of their products!
