[Old Hardware BIOS PXE] Lenovo X201 PXE Flash ROM Borked, trying to restore, ideas?

[kittmaster]

Couldn't find a BIOS support area, and this is not a MOD....more of a repair inquiry, hope this is the right area to inquire.

I have an old by everyone's standards Lenovo X201 laptop, was running Win10, no issues. One thing I noticed was that the Ethernet card Intel 82577LM had a Code 10 out of nowhere. Nothing fixed it, other drivers, switch to win 11. Thought hardware was borked and time to toss. I didn't do any updates like BIOS or drivers, so it was odd to suddenly see the Code 10. From what I've read on multiple pages, this doesn't seem to be uncommon as others have seen the same....good lord.

Installed Win7 since I couldn't find new Win10 x64 drivers for it and noticed that with Lenovo drivers, it worked, reported 1Gbps link proving hardware was ok. Ran speed tests, all good. So hardware is good.

Back to win10, still code 10. For some reason after reading pages on the web, many said to check the BIOS settings to see if that may fix it, so I enabled Boot Option ROM in the BIOS and blamo, the issue that was masked suddenly showed itself, now getting a Boot Agent Error (v1.5.31) on boot, nothing earth shattering, just that it can't boot PXE.

Long story short, I used intel boot utility tools and the utility BOOTUTILW64E.EXE from the PREBOOT toolchain, it basically stated NO FLASH FOUND. From images from the web, if PXE ROM was present, the tool would show the PXE FLASH image present. So it seems the LAN ROM is borked.

So running the command BOOTUTILW64E.EXE nic=1 -defcfg fixed the Code 10 immediately and now in Win10/11 the Ethernet works as expected. Link shows 1Gbps, driver from MS is good....in "that domain" all is good.

So the last item is to try and get the PXE image restored back into the NIC and fix the boot agent and Option ROM installed.

From everything I've read, being a laptop, it says that the OEM (Lenovo) BIOS update images should "update" the BIOS and the ECP controller and I/O's, things like the peripherals like the NIC ROM which contains the Intel Boot Agent. It has been stated that it can't be directly updated even if I had a valid PXE ROM.

I've tried for it update it by going all the way back to first BIOS FLASH to see if it would update the LAN Option ROM:

https://support.lenovo.com/us/en/do...32...p-thinkpad

I've tried 1.12, 1.31, 1.39, 1.40, and the 1.40-1.15/1.15 just to see if I could have it trigger an update to the ROM and put back the PXE boot image. None of it worked.

I'm trying to speak to Lenovo in the software group, but got disconnected, but will continue to try.

I will never use this feature, and I can turn off the error (Boot Agent Error) via the bios by turning off the option ROM, but this is more of an exercise as to learning how to fix this because I am the type that wants it to be 100%.

Anyone have any ideas on short of removing the bios chip and replacing it with one from ePay and then having to use their (Lenovo) maintenance disk to rebuild the UUID and serial number flashing which is a "final" resort if I can't find a software solution.

I don't want to trash this laptop, I use it as a backup for my travels, and the hardware is good, so please keep that in mind if you have a suggestion.

Thanks in advance for any thoughts or advice.

Chris