No I know again why I should carefully read things when I update a firmware like the Management Engine :/.
I’ve got an Asus z170 pro gaming rev 1.04 and now it does nothing but running the fans.
I spotted on station-drivers the Intel Management Engine (ME) Firmware Version 11.0.0.1191 (1.5Mo) today. Like a child i run the firmware update ignoring the the fact that it’s a PCH-LP firmware, not PCH-H!!!
Now I have to wait till monday to order a new Biochip. Wonderful…
Is it possible to get an working bios chip, plug it into my board. Boot into uefi, load setup defaults, take the chip out, plug the damaged chip in and press save?
Or can I boot with the good chip. Open the Bios Flashtool, plug a usb stick into the board with the bios on it, change the good with the bad chip, flash again and it will work?
Or maybe this solution idea isn good, cause it could damage the good chip with overload when im Pluggin it out, wenn the pc’s running?
Oh lord - every day you learn something new :§…
Ok, back in normal brain using mode i’ll buy an new Bios Chip on monday…better i’ll buy two for safety ;).
These special things only happen when it’s weekend…grrr.
Initially it said that it was for PCH-H and I wrote a reply telling them that they are wrong. Even the filename says Consumer LP (not H). When it comes to ME I suggest you check this thread for updates or if Station Drivers finds something first, check if it was uploaded by Pacman. He knows the difference between H and LP and wouldn’t confuse them.
I am more surprised by the fact that FWUpdate allowed you to continue with the flashing. So your system was operational, flashed 1191 LP with FWUpdate and then bricked? If yes, I wonder if Intel does any basic testing before releasing these tools. That would be the third important FWUpdate bug we have discovered.
In order to restore the previous chip you can do a “hot swap” as it’s called. Boot the system from a working chip, have the flasher ready, remove the good chip and replace with the corrupted on the fly, flash on the corrupted chip and you are good to go. Two working chips. Note though that in order to replace the ME region your flash descriptor must be unlocked, otherwise a cheap external programmer is the best way to repair the corrupted chip.
Hey plutomanic,
thanks for your response.
Yes, it was like you said. All was working well, than I used the update.bat in the x64 directory from the station driver firmware. In my sight the update bat had nothing wrong in it when I opened it with the editor.
When I executed the bat file the was no error. All seems to working well.
But as in the previous updates I really have had to check the file which contains the LP in it. So I was just blind…sadly.
I tried to find in german forums someone with the same board/revision but till now, nothing happened in this direction. But maybe thats good because I could read on different websites that hotflashing could do a short circuit.
So now I’ll buy on monday two new bios chips and hope all will be fine again.
But could you describe your last sentence on the other way. I don’t know what you exactly mean with the locked me region. But when I understand it the right way there’s no problem wenn i get a brandnew pre-flashed bios chip?!
Lovely, so FWUpdate doesn’t perform that basic check. I will add a warning at my thread to hopefully avoid such an incident in the feature. Who knows, even I might one day accidentally upload an LP instead of H and end up bricking a bunch of people’s systems.
Well search google for the best way to do a “hot swap” and whether it’s not really a good method. I know it works but maybe it can cause a short circuit indeed on some cases. Sorry, no experience other than the one time I did it for me years ago.
The SPI chip has some regions inside (Descriptor, ME, BIOS, GbE etc). The Descriptor controls the read/write access to/from regions. In contrast to BIOS, the ME is usually not allowed to be overwritten or tampered with. If the other regions don’t have access to it the descriptor is “locked”. Any software flashers (some exceptions apply such as FWUpdate, certain in-BIOS flashers etc) rely on the descriptor so only if it is unlocked are you able to rewrite/replace the ME region. To check quickly if it’s locked you can run Flash Programming Tool with the command fptw64 -d spi.bin. If it reports Error 26, it’s locked. Otherwise, unlocked. But of course that requires an operational system.