Lenovo Y400 / Y500 Bios Recovery from Backup

[PlannedObsolescence 2]

The Recovery . . .

 

Read all the below (twice) before starting!
1) Use a USB thumb drive (preferably with a working activity LED, see note 9 below) and format it as FAT or FAT32
2) Copy only the “QIWY3.bin” file to the drive – nothing else
3) Remove the battery from your Y500/Y400
4) Remove the external power cable
5) Insert the thumb drive in the USB port next to the HDMI connector
6) Hold down the “Fn” and “R” at the same time (do not release until step 9) ‡
7) Insert the external power (still holding the  “Fn” and “R” buttons down)
8) Briefly press the power button
9) The laptop will try to start and will read the thumb drive, here is where the USB thumb drive activity LED comes in handy, when you see drive activity release the  “Fn” and “R” buttons
10) CRITICAL, DO NOT TOUCH ANYTHING ON THE LAPTOP OR REMOVE POWER!! At this point the fan will run at full speed, LED’s may or may not blink – the magic is happening here – you bricked BIOS is being re-written with the crisis BIOS (QIWY3.bin) file!
11) The laptop will power off briefly when done, and then restart.
12) With luck, you’ll now be able to access the BIOS screen via pressing F2 during boot up

 

Other helpful tools/sources:

 

Phoenix Tool  – this tool is handy to help identify the recovery BIOS file needed.  When ran using the BIOS “BIN” file, the tool will yield “QIWY3.bi?” confirming that the “ QIWY3.bin” file is to be used for the crisis recovery.

† bios-mods.com has a great listing on how to recover the an Insyde BIOS (what the Y500 and Y400 use)
‡ This post at bios-mods.com was handy to find the working “Fn + R” key combination, several other posts on the web will point to the “Fn + B” combination; however, the the “Fn + B” combination didn’t work for my laptop (it may for yours), be ready to try all 12 combinations!

 

Credit:

http://blog.jimsjump.com/2016/02/07/lenovo-y510p-v305-bios-bricked-crisis-recovery-solved/  <-- The above method is the same as the method that was used to do a bios recovery for the Y510p / Y410p described. You just have to use a different recovery name ("Yx01.bin"). This method may work on other Lenovo IdeaPads with the same/similar type Insyde Bios as long as you use the correct recovery name.

 

UPDATE: The recovery name for a Lenovo IdeaPad Y580 version 2.06 bios is also “QIWY3.bin”. I checked it with the Phoenix tool. However, I noticed that Y580 bios versions 8.00 and 8.01 don't give you any recovery names when you use the Phoenix tool.

 

Edited March 3, 2017 by PlannedObsolescence

[divinitous 0]

Awesome!  Thank you very much for providing this.  My laptop won't even get to the Lenovo screen.  I suspect that I really messed up something good with my tinkering.  Luckily I saved the original bios file when I installed the modified one.  Fingers crossed that this is the issue and I didn't cook the video card instead with my SLI tinkering.

 

This should be a sticky.

 

Update:  Well, didnt seem to fix my issue.  Still no video with screen or external monitor.  Doing this procedure the USB drive would flash a few times at startup and that's about it.

Edited September 14, 2017 by divinitous

[TaTaRinBsB 10]

Recently modified BIOS 8.01 was corrupted by me, I was trying to use eGPU with my Lenovo y580 and messed up with bios. After that black screen of death is appearing but fan and led light are responding, as well as caps lock and numlock and other indicators on the laptop.

 

Can anyone provide proper name for bios to flash it with usb stick using Fn+B or Fn+R. I looked everywhere, used phoenix/andy's tool to see proper recovery name for bios file.