ASUS M11AA P8H61-M PRO Bricked BIOS Please help.

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#1 | ASUS M11AA P8H61-M PRO Bricked BIOS Please help. datum

Tue Dec 06, 2016 6:26 pm (Last edited: Tue Dec 06, 2016 6:28 pm)

Firstly hi. I was messing with my BIOS and tried to flash the original P8H61-M PRO BIOS while my board is an OEM so it doesn't work. So I bricked my bios and am currently trying to fix i by hotswapping the chip to my brothers computer. I'm able to flash the chip with afudos but when I try it I still get no boot. Dumping the current flash and using UEFItool gives a parsebios error "parseBios: one of volumes inside overlaps the end of data" and it only shows a couple of headings as if the bios doesn't fit on the chip properly. Using fpt only lets me use the tag -bios and if I try the full flash I'm getting Error 25: The host CPU does not have write access to the target flash area...

I have a backed up bios from before it broke but all the BIOS files are all 6 or 8mb and the bios area itself shows to be only 2.5mb or so in fpt. Even a backup now when I dump it is only 2.5mb whereas my original backup is over 6mb.

Anyone have any ideas what I could try? Grateful for any suggestions, Thanks.

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#2 | RE: ASUS M11AA P8H61-M PRO Bricked BIOS Please help. datum

Tue Dec 06, 2016 7:45 pm

Does your brother have the exact same model, meaning M11AA? The BIOS that ASUS provides at their website is 8MB so full SPI image with all of it's sections (Flash Descriptor + ME + BIOS). Are you able to update the BIOS via the BIOS menu? If yes, try that. Your Flash Descriptor is locked based on error 26 so you cannot read/write the Flash Descriptor and ME areas of the SPI chip with software methods. Maybe the in-BIOS flashing works though so give it a try. Boot the system with the proper chip, once at the BIOS do the swap, flash the latest BIOS from ASUS, shutdown and remove the hopefully now reflashed chip. Mind you, if there is an in-BIOS flasher, you may need to remove the AMI Capsule header first via UEFITool. Not sure what it will expect.

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#3 | RE: ASUS M11AA P8H61-M PRO Bricked BIOS Please help. datum

Tue Dec 06, 2016 8:23 pm (Last edited: Tue Dec 06, 2016 8:38 pm)

He doesn't have the same board at all but I just thought I'd try it. There's asus bupdater but when I try that its saying something about the current image not containing a valid boot image.

EDIT: I was allowed flash with fpt before it bricked that's what got me into this mess. afu seems to be the only software that's claiming to flash the chip successfully but it's not doing it fully.

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#4 | RE: ASUS M11AA P8H61-M PRO Bricked BIOS Please help. datum

Tue Dec 06, 2016 8:49 pm

Try what I said. If it doesn't work then, since the chip is removable, I suggest you get a cheap programmer and flash quickly that way. Don't forget to remove the AMI Capsule in such case.

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#5 | RE: ASUS M11AA P8H61-M PRO Bricked BIOS Please help. datum

Tue Dec 06, 2016 9:05 pm (Last edited: Tue Dec 06, 2016 9:09 pm)

So what's happening is bupdater is saying no boot signature found in the file when I try use it. The file I have has my mac address and everything inserted into it. My brothers board only seems to let me flash biostar roms by pressing f12 (the board is biostar but the chip fits into it so I thought it was worth a try). I have a backup of the original bios which contains my mac address and everything. If I could even find someone with an asus computer I could at least try from the bios to get something to happen.

As I said AFU seems to be the only utility that reports to successfully flash but I still get no boot and reading back from the chip gives me a 2.5mb invalid bios image according to uefitool. Maybe it's something to do with the asus layout. Bupdater actually reports the bios and version and everything afer I flash with afu but I still get no boot when I put the chip back into my pc.

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#6 | RE: ASUS M11AA P8H61-M PRO Bricked BIOS Please help. datum

Wed Dec 07, 2016 5:30 pm (Last edited: Wed Dec 07, 2016 5:33 pm)

To transfer ASUS board info you can use CodeRush's FD44Editor. So you can take the latest 8MB BIOS/SPI from ASUS and transfer settings via that great tool. I then suggest you use an external cheap programmer like the one I linked above with the instructions by CodeRush once again. If you think you can flash it via that weird different-system-hot-swap method then give it a try using the created ASUS+FD44Editor BIOS with the AMI Capsule removed first. I suggest you use Intel's Flash Programming Tool with command "fpt -f BIOS.bin" (write entire 8MB image to SPI). Both AFU and FPT are software flashers though so you may not be able to reflash the entire SPI chip (obligatory in your case, unless you know for sure that only the BIOS region of the SPI chip is bricked and not the rest such as FD and ME) as a hypothetically locked Flash Descriptor might not allow read/write access to the FD itself and ME. Even if it's locked I'm not sure how FPT will detect such status: either by reading the hot-swapped chip directly when a read/write action is requested by you or by the values of the originally booted SPI chip from Biostar. Weird case scenario regardless.

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