Alaric323

1 hour ago, razblack said:

 

it could have, but you would think that after flashing all settings would have been reset.

 

let me know if you need the EC file.. i don't believe it contains anything that would be helpful, I took one from a good mainboard and flashed it to the one I've been working on though and it just seemed to change the LED colors.  but I'm not 100% sure.  I was; however, able to use the clip to flash the EC instead of removing it from the MB like I did with the BIOS

My clip seemed to work for the main bios chip.  Got a completely verified hash after flashing the chip, and double-verified just to make sure.

I'm figuring the EC must do SOMETHING other than colour settings for the AlienFX.  Wouldn't need 1~2 MB just for that, I think.  Maybe it holds the settings that were changed from an unlocked BIOS, but since I'm far more familiar with UEFI chip layouts than BIOS layouts, I could be completely wrong.

Thinking back a bit, I think I had the memory overclocked through the bios.  Would that have something to do with this?

Flashing the "tailed" bios results in 4 beeps when trying to boot up.  Dell considers this a memory failure, but I know there's nothing wrong with the RAM chips themselves.

I just used Linux' "tail" command to read the last 4 MB of the file and output that to a different file.  Problem now is, it didn't contain the EC's .bin file.

On 8/31/2017 at 8:16 PM, razblack said:

ok, got the solder iron today..  desoldered BIOS (chip U48) and was able to 100% reflash with no issues.

 

just a note for anyone else whom resurrects this in the future.  the FD files you get from either ASUS or here will need to have their header data removed for use with the CH341a programmer.  The header is ~128KB in size (the files are around 4224KB and need to only be 4096KB).

 

I also choose to use Linux Mint with the Flashrom open source program (flashrom.org) and it worked spectacularly.

 

thanks! and much appreciate the information found here.. once i get more $ in my paypal, i'll donate as i have done for tonymacx86.

How did you remove the header?  I'm having the same problem with a bad bios that you did, but I'm using an SPI programmer with a clip instead.