11-06-2017, 10:29 AM
My Thinkpad T430 (Intel GPU only; no NVidia) now has a black screen when powered on. No beeps are heard but the LEDs light up and the HDD makes noise. I have backups of both the 8MB SPI and 4MB SPI BIOS/UEFI chips (acquired with Raspberry Pi 3 and Pomona clip). I extracted blobs from these backups then built a Coreboot image and flashed it. The first time I did this, the computer completely booted up with graphical glitches which went away when the login screen came up. I was happy that the whitelists were gone and ME was broken at the knees. I wanted to fix the image so that I could actually see and interact with the firmware.
This is where I made a stupid mistake
. I figured it would be safe to try anything since I had complete backups of the BIOS/UEFI chips. So, I tried updating the firmware via flashrom with the internal option. I didn't get too far; all I did was test flashrom with the verbose option; I ditched the plan when flashrom gave me very intense warnings. Next time I rebooted, the computer died. I then tried reflashing various Coreboot image configurations and even the original image (more than once); the best I ever got was a blank screen with and flashing LEDs with fan spinning. I tried removing the CMOS battery, thinking that could be the problem, but it doesn't seem to matter. I've read that this could be a sign of ESD, but I was very careful with the motherboard and left it in its tray/base to minimize the possibility of that happening.
I don't know what to do now. Either ESD killed the motherboard (and the BIOS stuff is just a huge coincidence) or I might have messed up the EC. Is the EC firmware embedded into the BIOS stuff? Does anyone have an EC backup I can use? Any other suggestions? Please help me!
(I'm willing to post the firmware dumps if it will help/anyone wants them)
This is where I made a stupid mistake
. I figured it would be safe to try anything since I had complete backups of the BIOS/UEFI chips. So, I tried updating the firmware via flashrom with the internal option. I didn't get too far; all I did was test flashrom with the verbose option; I ditched the plan when flashrom gave me very intense warnings. Next time I rebooted, the computer died. I then tried reflashing various Coreboot image configurations and even the original image (more than once); the best I ever got was a blank screen with and flashing LEDs with fan spinning. I tried removing the CMOS battery, thinking that could be the problem, but it doesn't seem to matter. I've read that this could be a sign of ESD, but I was very careful with the motherboard and left it in its tray/base to minimize the possibility of that happening. I don't know what to do now. Either ESD killed the motherboard (and the BIOS stuff is just a huge coincidence) or I might have messed up the EC. Is the EC firmware embedded into the BIOS stuff? Does anyone have an EC backup I can use? Any other suggestions? Please help me!
(I'm willing to post the firmware dumps if it will help/anyone wants them)