You yourself. There’s lots of information in this forum regarding use of a programmer.
SPI chip type and voltage you’ll have to find out yourself
Dump the bricked bios and attach it here do that one can have a look into it.
What were the symptoms of your daughter’s laptop? I think I’m in a similar cirmcumstance where my 14ARE05 shows no sign of life apart from a brief flash in the power light when plugged in.
I have a story behind what happened to my unit and am open to sharing it in a PM. I believe your process might help me revive my laptop, and would like to be able to contact you at points of assistance.
@RookiePaw If you want an answer from a special person address the member directly. Otherwise your post might not get recognized.
Your “story behind” has to be quite valuable as you’re promoting it as an ‘offer’ via PM. Most people are just happy to find some help to get their machines up and running again…
Welcome to the Win-Raid forums!:
@Peterson Did you have progress dumping the bricked firmware?
I’ve just bought a programmer off Amazon, but I can’t the drivers for it. I’ve done a handful of Google searches. What keywords/specs should use? The “run” light on my programmer hasn’t come on either, but I think that has to do with the missing drivers. That and the “Error connecting CH341(-1)” in AsProgrammer are my current problems.
https://winraid.level1techs.com/t/guide-using-ch341a-based-programmer-to-flash-spi-eeprom
https://winraid.level1techs.com/t/guide-flash-bios-with-ch341a-programmer/
1 Like
Saya juga mengalami kejadian yang sama. Idepad flex 5 14ARE05. S/N : R90Y3VZH mohon di bantu modifikasi program ic bios saya🙏
I ended up bricking my 14ALC05 when doing a manual update from (iirc) GJCN27WW to GJCN33WW. Immediately after the flash progress bar finished and the text was given stating as much, it gone to a black screen. I gave it 10-20 seconds before thinking it just got stuck on first boot (it had already said the flash succeeded), but the reboot was to a brick. I do not have a keyboard backlight, but FN+Esc toggles that button. Caps lock is on and does not change when pressed.
After quite a bit of reading, I even see some new-ish comments so this is still a bit of an issue now (albeit almost nothing compared to 2021/22).
I did find on Reddit a “FN+R” method which allows flashing from a USB stick, however it seems to only function on Legion devices. (Method documented well here) The Flex 5 does seem to enter a special state when the instructions are followed (charger LED turns solid red but not blinking, and the USB drive shows activity), but the device appears to get stuck in a loop. Either this mode does not function on these devices or I just haven’t figured out how to make it work yet.
Currently I have a CH341A ordered which will arrive in a few days. That method seems to be my best bet, but I’ll continue to dig into that Crisis mode and see if I might be able to recover before then.
I don’t know if you’re still around @Plastixx, but if you are, would you be open to helping me if it turns out necessary? I am planning on following the instructions you laid out in the past, and it seems clear enough to me, but maybe I’ll run across something you know the answer to. I’ll naturally have different offsets to copy over since my device is different, but I don’t know what needs copying versus what doesn’t. Maybe if I’m lucky there won’t be much showing up when I diff the bad bios against the new one, but we’ll just have to wait and see.
Update: Success! I did two reads of the flash and compared the two to check the read was good. Then, I opened that file (let’s call it dump.bin) in UEFITool to check the structure matched Plastixx’s description in Step 7. It did.
I then opened the GJCN33WW.cap file, extracted from Lenovo’s bios update exe, and extracted the same section from that. Let’s call that file toflash.bin. I then opened toflash.bin and dump.bin in two side-by-side UEFITool windows to double check that everything lined up. They were, so I flashed toflash.bin onto the chip, and the machine was back to life.
Its first boot was longer than expected, but everything after has been normal. As expected, I lost the serial number, UUID, and Windows key, but since I don’t use any of them, I personally didn’t bother to recover them. If someone with another 14ALC05 decides to go down this path, I unfortunately don’t know what offsets to copy. That said, you might be able to use the same offsets Plastixx used for the 14ARE05 since the two devices have similarly structured bioses. (Note: They are NOT the same, but the ranges he described just so happen to match.)
If interested post your dump of the bricked machine.
0x5EA000 to 0x5EA3FF (including) Laptop data
0x617000 to 0x6170B9 (including) Windows code (EVSA store)
Could yo please help me with my bin file. This is my original, i have tried the original steps but cant seem to find what region needs to be copied.
thanks on advance
Please post the serial number of the machine.
S/N: PW00A4N7
Thanks
That’s what I could find:
0x5EA000 - 0x5EA3FF DMI
0x617000 - 0x6170BF Windows code
could you please generate a bin with my serial number?, the ones that i have are different in structure so i dont know what to do after, also i downloaded the most recent bios from lenovo, converted to cap and open with uefitool, after decapsulating it has 1 byte extra and could not be written on the chip
You have an older firmware version that is no longer accessible. Structure for AMD firmware did change often with later versions and sometimes a stock firmware won’t even work.
The firmware is easy to extract, see pic. You don’t need machine specific information to try if this will work at all. If the machine boots you might import this information in a second step.
Sorry, I don’t have time to follow to this thread anymore, but I just wanted to say that downloading previous BIOS versions is as simple as editing the download link.
Yepp, that’s well known but try with any version older than 30…
Thanks, i was able to extrac it, but it doesnt seems to work on the laptop, the problem persist, shoud i buy a new eprom ?
If you can read back / make a fresh dump of the chip and the chip contains exactly (100%) what you tried to flash the SPI chip should be OK.
There are som firmwares described as working on badcaps
If those don’t work either this might not be firmware related.