I’m a Fedora user, and I had Secure Boot disabled. I decided to enable Secure Boot, but instead of resetting the setup, I mistakenly added new platform keys. After rebooting, I got:
Black screen, no ROG boot logo
All LEDs are on, but no response
What I’ve Tried So Far
Power Drain Attempt
Disassembled laptop
Disconnected the battery
Held power button for 30-45 seconds
Reconnected AC → No change
BIOS Recovery via USB
Downloaded .311 BIOS file from Asus
Renamed it to .bin and .rom
Placed on FAT32 USB drive
Tried BIOS recovery key combos:
Ctrl + Home
Ctrl + Esc
Ctrl + R
No response, still black screen
Next Steps: SPI Flashing?
Since BIOS recovery didn’t work, my only option seems to be a BIOS flash using an SPI programmer. But I’ve read that some Asus notebooks block BIOS flashing, so I’m concerned about whether this will even work.
Current Questions:
Is this Winbond chip the BIOS, and the ITE chip the EC?
How screwed am I? (How far up the creek without a paddle?)
Can I successfully flash the BIOS with an SPI tool, or am I out of luck?
If SPI flashing is possible, what’s the best tool for the job?
Looking for best bang for the buck or a “you’ll be glad you bought this” option
The Financial Pinch
I can barely afford RMA shipping, let alone a full repair. I assume Asus will just swap the motherboard, which will cost me a kidney.
Identify the motherboard mode, try to get a schematic, dump and save backup of all readable ICs after correct ID and their specs, for correct programmer operations.
Multiple ICs can be present according the motherboard/model, can have Main IC for bios region and/or EC+Bios+ME FW, or separate ones for ME, EC, TPM etc…
Plenty of info on the forum with similar SPI issues/recover
The forum has a search box… Search results for ‘Zephyrus M16’ - Win-Raid Forum
So if your new to this… the moderator just gave you a straight answer, he has no need to lose his time with users that dont research a bit about the subject.
Did you research the IC model before asking…no.
Did shared any photos of the motherboard (ALL PCB) to help identify other possible ICs…no.
Do i have to tell you that…it may be need search on the PCB for other IC, there’s your anwser by yourself.
Specific info if we were Asus and have access to all mb shecmatics/boardview files.
So keep digging and do your part, cause im not going to lose my time doing your task and search the forum the exact links for you.
Im sure that you have the “picture” now, good luck and Over_N_OUT.
Lets be clear…this is the kind of job that i do and is done on a workshop, to put food on the table, so everyone so be grateful that plenty of users of the forum, some with the same profissional activity, are willing to help as they CAN and as their time allows it, gettting the “picture” now?
So no user will have or is willing to lose their time without propely and the most capable user shared info on his issue.
Cutting all the BS… do you now understand what you have to look and do to, resolve your issue or still dont?
Sir…move on please, im not a “paid” moderator and im not concern with the quality of the anwsers that users would like, they shouldnt expect what they wish for as they wish for, this is a forum not an IT Workshop, i dont care about you as a “costumer” a remote one, get real sir.
You need a (CH341-) programmer to dump your own firmware, replace its NVRAM with a stock one and to flash this repaired firmware back.
There are two alternatives otherwise:
Someone did this job on this specific machine already and steps in.
Nobody here with this specific machine who had this or a similar problem or just not answering.
Unfortunately there’s not a lot of users which are replying to these requests. So you might concur that it’s depending on you to give as much as possible of the necessary details so that people with general experience might be able to help as easily as possible.
.
For example: Do a web- search for the chiptypes found, datasheets are almost always easily accessible, compare simply the size of the chips found to expected size of a firmware image
For example: If unable to find the correct chip, make detailed and sharp pics of the mainboard and attach them to your post.
For example: Give specification of the hardware- when looking up Asus Zephyrus M16 there’s different years and different sub- models
For example: Avoid writing several posts what you do expect and how you wish these requests be treated.
Well, community would mean give and take on both sides. But users with these requests normally are dayflies: machine working- user disappeared. That’s not what “community” means to me, and frankly: You behave quite demanding after less than a day and zero contribution to the community.
Most CH341 come with a soic8 clamp, but all of these are quite cheap quality, so they might even be dead on arrival and the clamp won’t be of best quality to put it mildly. There are several guides / threads regarding use of a CH341 here in the forum.
Have a look into this thread, especially #5 regarding knocking off these SMD parts!
Yes, asus provides not a complete firmware image
Left complete firmware from linked thread, right Asus update
Asus has some duplicate EFI volumes- the ones between 289EFB98-9F4C-47F5-9AC4-35A4D847B0A9 and 61C0F511-A691-4F54-974F-B9A42172CE53- and an update to Intel ME region in DE90FFA8-B985-4575-AB8D-ADE52C362CA3
In case overwriting with stock you’d need anyway a valid dump to find out which of the 2 EFI volume tree was the right one and it would be a very bad idea, too, to take just a dump from another machine- might be correct tree, or might not.
Always make a valid backup (at least 2 a 100% identical dumps with a valid structure in UEFIToolNE) of every chip you want to flash!
oh, you do humm… That’s nice, has anyone here asked you any value for the time and help granted, this is what mis grateful users that come here to this forum, should take in mind, instead of complaining and criticizing the forum and staff, of course a lot of them are simply “kids” or raged users.
Enjoy it if you succeed and next time be humbler about your reactions, instead of taking it AS IT IS.
This is a post for future users reference, with same behaviour that should think twice and take a different aproach to this forum and their users contributions as possible, upon their requests.
This is not a repair shop or a gift center, this a learning forum.
The comment was deleted, as my last post IS to serve as an example of such situations.
You’re not here to comment or to express your opinions on the staff and their judgment.
If I remember right there was at least a post with kinda plan for action but it seems to have disappeared? Thinking through the next steps is normally considered something useful to do. It’s an active process helping to understand the procedures involved.
Anyway, don’t know what was written here in between, but according to the edits of the first post it seems that winning a (not very meaningful) fight seems more important to the user than getting his gear working again.
EDIT Seems correct since the user got deleted or deleted his account himself. As written, there are very few users answering these requests and having a unfinished thread simply means wasted time. I already sorted out some kinds of requests and will further reduce my activity. Just writing this post, then detecting that the user is no longer existing- again it’s wasted time.
@MeatWar I’d appreciate if you would close those threads, you have to scroll to the first post again to find out that this is a dead end.
One additional comment: The mentioned asus update is a PFAT configuration, one needs to run them through AMI_PFAT_Extract to get the file I showed in an earlier post.
