I got a second hand Lenovo S30 workstation which has a OEM X79/Patsburg MB with IME7.1, The IME7.1 has updated to the newest version 7.1.86.1221. But this can’t help the MB supporting Ivy-Bridge CPU without IME8. Sure, Lenovo has nothing to help this. I have read the tutorial on this forum carefully and updated the GBE firmware from 1.3 to 1.5 successfully. When I update the IME8 the tool just feed back the error message:
Maybe I should feel lucky that the MB hasn’t bricked. Can any experts give me some advice that whether the S30 OEM MB has a salvation.
Thanks for reading this post, English is not my first language, Thank you.
Do not flash a ME Region image with FPT unless you have reconfigured it with FITC to reflect your specific system configuration, FWUpdate is the only ME flasher that does not require that but it doesn’t work with major version upgrades.
Never proceed with a firmware flash using FPT if the “file length” error appears. Only if you are certain that there are no data after the smaller image ends. If there are data at the SPI chip after that point you would end up with a bricked ME and thus system. It’s best to add padding at the end to make the size equal to that of the SPI chip’s ME Region.
Lenovo seems to have two BIOS branches, A0KTxxA for ME7 firmware (SB) and A2KTxxA for ME8 firmware (SB/IVB). After extraction, the actual ME firmware are not there (not strange, they are not updated with a normal BIOS update either way due to locked descriptor) but the MEBx is clearly v7 and v8 respectively which proves what I said before. Also, MEInfo shows A0 bios and MEBx v7.
Your system has the A0 branch so ME7 and thus SB only. Why they have two branches I don’t know for sure. Probably some S30 systems shipped with a newer board revision with IVB support.
The latest GbE for ME7 is most probably v1.3, v1.5 is for ME8. I don’t have a system with GbE so I don’t know if it’s ok to upgrade that but I doubt you will benefit from such an action while still on ME7 either way.
Your system has a locked Flash Descriptor so you cannot use FPT and a ME Region image to upgrade from ME7 to ME8 either way. And unless the OEM has done this officially at the latest BIOS (not the case here), you shouldn’t attempt it either way. You may be able to unlock your descriptor but in case you end up with a brick, a programmer would be needed. If you had a programmer (and thus the “safety” that comes with it) you could try some things. First dump your firmware (the Lenovo image is not moddable), use FITC to replace ME, GbE, MEBx and try to flash it back (it wouldn’t work, of that I’m certain). Or test if flashing the A2 BIOS via Windows is an ok move, otherwise restore using the programmer + previous A0 SPI dump etc. But these are all advanced tests and unless you really want (and already have at hand) an IVB cpu, they are not worth the effort.
ME update from 7 to 8 was made during the major platfrom update from EDK-based firmwares to EDK2-based, with about 15 different modules of Intel CPU and PCH package update, including Heci drivers, CpuPowerManagement, PchInit, PchPlatform and so on. There is no chance to get ME8 support without Lenovo.
Thank you, sir! It seems that it is unwise and reckless to what I have done. The MB nearly bricked if the FPT hadn’t stopped me. But it is fun during the exploring of this. I’ve learned a lot.
