Hello. See some good advice on the topic around here, was wondering if anyone else faced issues when trying to flash Dell products. 7040m only supports Skylake so I’m adding 7-9th gen support to it with coffetime 0.99 software that I successfully used to add that to 3 different Asus boards on 100 series chipsets. I can read, dump, verify, flash and verify again my MX chip with AsProgrammer but as soon as I plug in power and try booting, BIOS chip content gets changed by the machine. Power button starts to flash and it probably tries to recover BIOS but fails and refuses to boot or show anything on the screen. I can see that there5 something else in my BIOS at around 40% mark when comparing BIOS contents to my mod file. When I flash it back to stock dump, it boots like nothing ever happened. I tried removing “BIOS lock” in coffeemod software but that didn’t help. Tried flashing with and without power, can verify successfully after that but it corrupts when trying to boot ans clear CMOS doesn’t help. Is there a BIOS settings that I can change so it doesn’t happen or is there something on the board that I should look for?
Well not all hardware boards Intel 100 series are sucessuful in to “CoffeLake mod” specailly non-regular motherboards as yours.
I do suggest to read the follwing threads/guides:
[Guide] CoffeeLake CPUs on Skylake and KabyLake mainboards - BIOS/UEFI Modding / BIOS Modding Guides and Problems - Win-Raid Forum
EDIT: I am almost sure, not betting at all… that you won’t find such board/system as a 7040M with a successful CoffeLake mod…that’s why i linked the threads.
You will see “regular” desktops boards Asus, MSI etc…
So 7th Gen only…? Does the bios at least has the right mcodes?
There’s successful reports of some Veriton N4650G (or 40G…not sure) mod to 7Th Gen…its in the forum…around some where, try to find it and ask gudinace to some users on that thread.
Searched for anything Dell related in these threads, not much help unfortunately. I’m trying to boot it with the same 6500t that it came with. It doesn’t even support 7th gen unfortunately which is why I’m doing all that. It’ll be my multimedia PC and I plan on using i3-7100 in it. Board has Q170 chipset so I don’t think there should be any issues except for it overwriting something on boot and refusing to start unless I write the dump back
It has only one code which is for Skylake I assume as it’s all that it supports officially. When trying to add microcodes with 0 additional modifications, it still does something when booting that results in verification failures against the mod later.
BIOS IC doesn’t seem to be locked or protected. Well, I didn’t try flashing without unprotect but that works just fine. I can verify it regardless of if the machine is plugged in or not after flashing and after some time as long as I don’t try to boot
Upd: it boots if I disable bios lock in coffeetime, disable me and change it but it doesn’t even if I just replace 506e3 microcode from the default one to a newer version
Found reports of it being impossible to do on overclockersRU. Dell and HP lock their BIOS from important modifications such as additional or updated microcodes, gop and vbios updates. It can possibly be done if some machine specific chip is replaced with a generic one from Intel or some other brand but I don’t want to bother with that. Just picked up a 3050m for my needs for another 50$.