x230 bricked after bios update? or hardware issues?

[nikrmana]

Hello,

Just got well preserved x230 that won't boot after bios update. Owner have no idea what went wrong and just bought new machine.

I have available CH341A programmer and can make backup of bios image from my own x230, but I am not sure if such image can be used on another machine?

Thanks,
b.

[Dudu2002]

Hello,

Just got well preserved x230 that won't boot after bios update. Owner have no idea what went wrong and just bought new machine.

I have available CH341A programmer and can make backup of bios image from my own x230, but I am not sure if such image can be used on another machine?

Thanks,
b.

Hi
dump from another laptop can not be used
need your bad dump

[bgravato]

Hi,

Sorry for the reposting... I meant to post this as new thread yesterday, but I posted on an old thread by accident...


I bought a x230 second hand on ebay (from UK) an year ago. 2x4GB ram (samsung), IPS screen, SSD, 9-cell battery, wifi, fingerprint reader, english keyboard.
I installed both linux and windows 7 on it. On windows, Lenovo's software kept bugging me about updating the bios, so I did (from Windows yes) it got bricked. It powered, power button light on, thinklight flashed once, fan spinned for a couple of seconds then stopped, black screen all the time, no image on external screen, etc... dead.
Not sure what the original bios version was.

Meanwhile I bought a few second hand motherboards. The first two I got I replaced them but still no luck... same symptoms.
The third motherboard I got worked and I got my x230 up and running again. I wiped the disk and installed Win7 and Linux again, though 99% of the time I'm using Linux.
BIOS version was 2.02 and EC 1.10.

I wanted to mod the bios to remove battery whitelist, but first I tried to update the bios with the original firmware to a more recent version... This time I played safe and decided to go with the bootable cd option... ("burning" it to an usb pen).
I also thought it would be a good idea to update one version at a time. I followed strickly the instructions on the txt file that comes with the bios update.

I downloaded the iso's from here: https://support.lenovo.com/pt/pt/downloads/ds029188
On linux, I used geteltorito to extract the image from the iso and "burned" it to USB with dd

I successfully updated from 2.02 to 2.06.
Then successfully update to 2.50, then 2.51, then 2.52, then 2.54.
All good up to this point. After each update I would reset bios to defaults (F9 on bios menu).
Then I decided to skip 2.55 update (it didn't change much) and go straight to 2.56 (changelog says it adds support for windows 8 ).

I booted from usb, run the the bios update, rebooted and BIOS flashing went through normally like the other times.
Then I got the "system will reboot in 5 seconds message" as usual, but when it restarted it didn't boot. Black screen, power button on, no reaction, the same I had an year ago with the "original" motherboard.

So I'm wondering if this might have been because I skipped the 2.55 update? Or maybe 2.56 and later versions introduce some change that is incompatible with my hardware, namely the IPS screen or the memory sticks?

If I remove both memory sticks and power on it starts beeping indicating a memory error as expected, so does that mean it's not completely bricked?

I tried removing the WIFI, fingerprint, etc boards, but it didn't make a difference. So if it's some hardware incompatibility with the bios I guess it must be either the screen, the RAM or the keyboard.

I also tried disconnecting the CMOS battery, but still no luck...

I don't know which BIOS version was on the motherboards I bought that didn't work, but maybe it was a more recent version and that's why they didn't work?

Any thoughts?

Thanks.

[bgravato]

Just a follow up in case someone with similar problem sees this...


I got the problem sorted out by replacing the RAM... Though this has some weird twists...

Original laptop came with 2x2GB memory modules that worked fine before firmware upgrade...
I recently tried those modules on a different laptop and they worked fine.

Then I tried some other memory modules I had on the x230 and it came back to life.
All the other replacement motherboards I got seem to be working fine as well with these different memory modules.

So the issue seems to be caused by some incompatibility between the "original" memory modules more recent BIOS versions...