03-30-2015, 02:26 AM
Hi,
I am in a bit of a predicament. I had a working and moddifed (whitelist removed) BIOS installed on my Lenovo Ideapad N581 and all I wanted to do was to change the amount of shared GPU RAM. Yet somehow I must have done something wrong such that my device seems to be bricked now
Looking for ways to resolve this issue I found a whole lot of information about the recovery mode. The recovery mode itself seems to be working just fine. I extracted the ROM from the official v96 Lenovo BIOS update executable, put it on a freshly formatted USB-Stick and renamed it to QIWG5.BIN, which I believe is the correct name for the recovery image.
While in recovery mode the USB-Stick is accessed and the file seems to be read. Then the LED of the stick turns dark for approx. 3 seconds after which it comes back online and the whole process starts again and again and again ...
If I change the filename to something else the reading process is much shorter which leads me to believe that the filename I used is the correct one. It seems to me that the recovery mode somehow refuses to flash the ROM.
The same v96 BIOS update file is being offered as download not just for all variants of the N581 but also the N580 and N585 products. Could the behaviour of the recovery mode have something to do with this? Do I need to extract a certain part from the ROM?
As a second measure I took my whole notebook apart in order to get access the to CMOS battery and disconnect it. For this I even had to use my soldering iron because the battery was hard-hooked to the board ...
Unfortunately disconnecting the battery for approx. 30-60 minutes did not work either ...
As a measure of last resort I would try to manually flash something onto the chip itself, but for that I would of course need the exact data. Ideally it would be nice to get my hand on an exact BIOS dump (backup) from someone who has the same variant of the N581 notebook, that at least should work if I am not mistaken?
EDIT: I just realized that BIOS settings are nowadays stored in a non-volatile RAM and the CMOS battery is mostly just for the RTC. Is there some way to corrupt the data of the NVRAM? Is the NVRAM integrated along with BIOS ROM itself or is it most likely an extra external chip? If it is an extra chip it should be easy to corrupt the data which would then give a CMOS checksum error, forcing it to reset to default values.
I am in a bit of a predicament. I had a working and moddifed (whitelist removed) BIOS installed on my Lenovo Ideapad N581 and all I wanted to do was to change the amount of shared GPU RAM. Yet somehow I must have done something wrong such that my device seems to be bricked now
Looking for ways to resolve this issue I found a whole lot of information about the recovery mode. The recovery mode itself seems to be working just fine. I extracted the ROM from the official v96 Lenovo BIOS update executable, put it on a freshly formatted USB-Stick and renamed it to QIWG5.BIN, which I believe is the correct name for the recovery image.
While in recovery mode the USB-Stick is accessed and the file seems to be read. Then the LED of the stick turns dark for approx. 3 seconds after which it comes back online and the whole process starts again and again and again ...
If I change the filename to something else the reading process is much shorter which leads me to believe that the filename I used is the correct one. It seems to me that the recovery mode somehow refuses to flash the ROM.
The same v96 BIOS update file is being offered as download not just for all variants of the N581 but also the N580 and N585 products. Could the behaviour of the recovery mode have something to do with this? Do I need to extract a certain part from the ROM?
As a second measure I took my whole notebook apart in order to get access the to CMOS battery and disconnect it. For this I even had to use my soldering iron because the battery was hard-hooked to the board ...
Unfortunately disconnecting the battery for approx. 30-60 minutes did not work either ...
As a measure of last resort I would try to manually flash something onto the chip itself, but for that I would of course need the exact data. Ideally it would be nice to get my hand on an exact BIOS dump (backup) from someone who has the same variant of the N581 notebook, that at least should work if I am not mistaken?
EDIT: I just realized that BIOS settings are nowadays stored in a non-volatile RAM and the CMOS battery is mostly just for the RTC. Is there some way to corrupt the data of the NVRAM? Is the NVRAM integrated along with BIOS ROM itself or is it most likely an extra external chip? If it is an extra chip it should be easy to corrupt the data which would then give a CMOS checksum error, forcing it to reset to default values.