Foxconn H55MXV

[nicolae788]

Hello,

I have a Foxconn MB which it's dead. Someone tried to update the bios and ended up with a brick. The MB has 2 SPI flash chips W25Q32. I am trying to re-flash the chips in an external programmer since the board it's dead and i have nothing similar to perform a hot flash with the flash program supplied by Foxconn. My question it's if there is a special procedure to flash these chips having in mind that this board has also intel ME, but which can be disabled. I am flashing the chips normally with an usb external programmer. The bios archive contains an 8MB bin file and two other 4MB files with a 1 and a 2 next to them. Logically this could be flash chip 1 and 2 since the images are 4MB and the chips are also 4MB. Whatever i do, i can't get this board to boot into something. If i remove the RAM it beeps for it, but with the ram installed nothing. Also on the debug card no info, no debug code, like stuck to 00

Any tips here for flashing this thing ? or about the procedure ?

Thank you !

Alex.

[nicolae788]

HI,

Well, after a lot of tests and trials and errors this board it's finally alive. Why it has 2 SPI flash chips. Because of the Intel ME image the entire image including the descriptor and BIOS image has 8192 kb and has to be spread across these 2 chips, so no backup BIOS here, as i initially presumed.The write procedure it's pretty straight forward. If the board manuf. provides you with the split image, for chip 1 and 2 then you just write them accordingly. If the image it's just one file and you have 2 chips, like in this case ( with the latest BIOS file ), just split the file in 2 4096 kb files with the aid of a tool like HxD or anything suitable for the job. After the splitting just write part 1 to chip 1 and part 2 to chip 2. To test the functionality, at least a part of it, i unplugged the RAM to check if it screams for it. If it beeps for RAM at least a part of the BIOS code it's working.

Turning back to my particular case i was able to successfully flash these 2 chips, get the beeps for RAM, but no picture or any other init after plugging in the RAM. Also no codes on the debug card ( i later found out that this board didn't emit any codes to the debug card on the PCI slot, curious; maybe someone can explain me why ? debug routed to another portion or disabled?? ) What to do ? no picture, no nothing. I decided to take another look, more carefully, at the processor socket. No wonder, after carefully looking, one pin in the DDR3 control region was perfectly bent from the middle and beneath it. After about 40 minutes of working on that pin to get it aligned and as straight as possible i reinstalled the CPU and the board started and works perfectly.

[Sml6397]

Hello nicolae788,

Thank you for posting this information!

~Steven