Coming from level1techs forum, thought it would be appropriate to post here, as well. I’m using an MSI laptop, Raider GE78HX, and troubled by Intel’s perplexing decision to drop TB1 and 2 support on TB4 chips, despite advertising the contrary. It’s fortunate that Mac users aren’t experiencing any issues. This PC uses a JHL8340 chip, running NVM40.2, and on the other side of the board appears to be a Winbond SPI flash, 8Mb.
I’ve already reached out to MSI to see if they can offer a downgrade path or an earlier NVM like Asus did, but they don’t seem to be very concerned. They simply said they were going to ask someone else.
From my beginner’s perspective, I have a few questions:
I’m wondering if it would be possible to use a dump from another board to flash this one. To rephrase: How standard are these firmwares across machines? Does each manufacturer create their own, or is it simply provided by Intel?
Also, maybe it is possible to extract the original NVM31 roms (whatever older than NV<36 should work) from the original capsule BIOS files? I have tried but have not suceeded yet.
Here are the BIOS files from a Raider 77HX that I also have access to and has the same issue. It is a little older so more likely to have an older NVM version. Tried but could not identify those parts using UEFI Tool. BIOS77HX
If we succeed at this, this will probably help a lot of people who have the same issue, and many electronic devices will be saved from the bin. There are a bunch of online forums already full of frustration from users who have loads of TB1/2 devices.
Here is a good read on the matter.