Lenovo G505 bad BIOS flash? No boot!

[ecipch]

Good day,

In order to try and diagnose/repair some crashing on the laptop, I decided to perform a BIOS update from version 1.02 to v2.04 (latest for that laptop on Lenovos site).

The flash initiated successfully, rebooted the machine, started flashing BIOS... at 100% the machine rebooted again, but screen remained black (no backlight). No Lenovo logo on boot.

Things tried so far:

-Pulled AC, pulled battery, disconnected CMOS battery.
-Tried BIOS recovery.. first I tried to use the .ROM file in the .exe downloaded from lenovos site. Then tried to use a ROM extractor.. also no go. Used Phoenix/Insyde tool to read BIOS, renamed file to VAWGAX64.ROM, but no joy with an empty USB drive.
Also tried VAWGAX64.FN, also no joy. Insyde tool says recovery filename is VAWGAX64.F?, but windows is unable to make such a file name extension.

Does anyone have further ideas as to what to do? Where to go from here? Or am I Ship out of luck?


Laptop in question is a Lenovo G505 (S/N CB23189137) with an AMD A6 APU.
https://pcsupport.lenovo.com/ch/en/produ...cb23189137

[ecipch]

Update:

Interesting development... with nothing else to try, I removed an SO-DIMM that I installed about 4 years ago to upgrade the amount of RAM from 4GB to 8GB since the laptop had a free ram slot. When I removed it, the laptop booted up right away. Reinstalling the RAM brought on the same symptoms as before.

This was never an issue up until the BIOS update. I wonder if Lenovo blacklisted certain RAM...? Is that a thing?