Hello, I also misunderstood how the FPT tool operates, and ended up flashing a stock bios file with FPT which didn't luckily brick the board, but the performance of my PC is now not great. I just changed the file extension on the stock bios file called E7B98IMS.1D0 to E7B98IMS.bin and flashed it with FPTw64 -SAVEMAC -f "nameofbios".bin. After further reading of the thread I came upon the following post, and am left wondering how to go about flashing the bios with FPT as intended to restore functionality. Apparently I need to create a complete SPI image with FITC but since I flashed the whole bios instead of trying to flash just the ME region incorrectly with FPT, I have no idea which files I need to input into FITC to build a flashable bios binary file. The motherboard in question is an MSI Z390-A PRO. Would it help if I provided an FPT dump? I cannot attach the whole bios dump FPT outputs, because of the 12MB file size restriction. The CSE ME version is reported as 12.0.70.1652, I used the tools provided for CSME version 12.

Zitat von plutomaniac im Beitrag #1848

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Write what to the first post? That did not solve the BIOS-related issue. You just used FPT instead of FWUpdate and in a completely wrong way. What do I mean?

a) To reflash the ME region with FPT you need an unlocked Flash Descriptor which is locked under normal circumstances so FWUpdate is needed for most people.

b) You never flash the file that I give at the first post like that via FPT. FPT rewrites the whole ME region which means both CODE + DATA. The DATA are motherboard/OEM specific settings set via FIT/FITC. FWUpdate deals only with the CODE and not DATA. If you want to use FPT, you need to download the EXTR or RGN file I provide, change settings at FITC according to your own motherboard's ME firmware and then flash it. What you just did is flash the DATA section of whatever motherboard I extracted that firmware from. Especially for mobile systems this could easily lead to a brick. For desktop, since most OEMs use similar settings, it may not necessarily lead to a brick but instabilities, disabled options and so on. Whether it results in critical failure or just weirdness it doesn't matter. The proper practice is what I described above. For FWUpdate none of these are needed as any EXTR or RGN image with any DATA is good as long as the CODE integrity is proper.

c) That FPT warning is not normal and should not be ignored. The region you tried to flash is smaller than the actual SPI ME Region. If the SPI region had any data after the size of the new firmware you could have ended once again with a bricked system. Always make sure that the FIT/FITC modified ME region you are trying to flash has the same size by adding padding manually if they are not there to begin with. Otherwise you need to use -rewrite command to completely erase the previous contents of the SPI ME Region.

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