BYUSinger84

I have a Lenovo Y500. I tried to flash the bios a few years ago but something happened and it never came back to life. Today I've tried to revive it. The TL;DR is...

 

No other "normal" recovery methods worked so...

I purchased an SPI clamp to read and flash the BIOS chip directly (using a Raspberry Pi). Because the bios file provided here and on Lenovo's website is almost 8 MB and the two chips on the motherboard are 4 MB and 2 MB, I had to dig around to try to find some one who had posted their .bin/.rom files for each of those chips. Unfortunately, none of them worked. The system will turn on, and it will even enter into recovery mode using FN+R, but the USB flashes a couple of times, then turns off, then cycles through the few flashes. Maybe I don't have the correct file it's looking for but idk anymore. 

 

If anyone knows specifically what files to put on that USB drive to make that work OR can give me a SPI dump of their BIOS chips, that would be splendid. 

 

Thanks. 

Worked perfectly coming from 1.10. I did have to remove my wifi card as I got an error when updating to 3.05 about invalid firmware. After I took it out everything worked great. Thanks!

Thank you so much for doing this. I have an older version and I'm about to try to upgrade. I'll respond with results.

Has anyone found a modded bios for the HP DV6 with the Radeon 6770M so I can use any wifi adapter? I just got a Lenovo 510p and I'll use a modded bios on there, but I want to set this computer up to use an AC card.

I got the Y510p with SLI'd 750M gt's. I know this isn't top of the line, but for $999 it's a great deal.

This is a fantastic post with great info. Thanks to the OP!

This would be nice but unfortunately as far as I've been able to tell you can't use the onboard with SLI/second card. It's ok though. I still get great battery life considering what this computer is and can do.