Hi all forum friends.
I’m trying to reflash my BIOS because it has an unknown ME Region.
I cannot change any settings in my BIOS apart from date and time.
Computer does not reboot properly (when doing Save & Exit in bios it tries to perform a reboot however just hangs)
I believe that all of these issues are caused by a corrupted bios or a faulty bios chip.
When trying to use programmer tool to reflash it, whenever I perform a read on BIOS chip I get different results every time I read it.
I’ve also tried to write latest ROM back to the chip however although reporting back that image has been written successfully it does not change anything on the chip itself.
What can be wrong here?
Any point in trying to reflash the bios or should I just get a new bios chip?
Bios chip is WinBond 25Q64FVSIG
Any help is highly appreciated.
If you cannot even read/write to the chip then this problem is beyond ME. Either the chip is dying or the programmer (hardware, maybe the software?) is not capable of reading it. Try different software versions just in case they can allow you to consistently read/write the same data. Otherwise, the programmer may not be able to work with that chip. If none of these help, you may need to replace the chip as you already said. Bottom line: you need to figure out how to read/write to the chip before dealing with firmware such as BIOS or ME.
Thank you for replying.
I know how to read/write the chip however I’m not quite sure that the software that I am using with this programmer is capable of reading my chip.
I highly apologise if it’s not allowed to post any URLs (please just remove it if it shouldn’t be here) but here is what I’ve bought - http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/262731801596?_…K%3AMEBIDX%3AIT
I’ve downloaded the drivers and software from the URL in the description and it loads up fine without any errors, and can perform “Verify” options as well as “Erase” however nothing actually happens to the chip itself.
I’m not aware of any other apps for this programmer, if you know any could you please provide download URLs please?
I’m starting to suspect that it’s the chip itself rather than the programmer, would you agree?
What other tests can I perform?
That is the software I’m using and unfortunately it’s returning different result every time I perform a read.
On the post you linked me to it says that sometimes reading bios can fail if it hasn’t been desoldered it can fail as the USB programmer will have to power up half of the motherboard.
Could this be my case?
By the way I have also tried to download those specific Zip archives (Hashes as exactly the same) without any luck. They, unfortunately, still can’t read bios chip properly.
If you are reading while it’s connected then maybe that’s why. As you can see from the replies of that post, I had no luck while it was soldered as well. Have you tried to dump via software tools? For example via Flash Programming Tool (fptw -f spi.bin) etc.
Would be nice to try but unfortunately I cannot install windows on that machine as I cannot enable boot from external device meaning that there is no way for me to boot into windows installation or anything like that.
I cannot enable it because BIOS does not save settings so it’s always working from it’s default.
Thinking of trying to put Linux LiveCD onto hard drive (If at all possible) and then boot from that.
Do you know if FPTW is available for linux at all? I’ve tried to google around but had no luck finding anything similar for linux 
FPT is Windows only. You can use flashrom under Linux.