I recently replaced the motherboard in my 8470p with a used one from ebay, and it seems like the ME firmware is corrupt. It actually looks like they've re-soldered a new bios chip on this board, as the chip is a bit crooked (a Winbond 25Q128BVFG).

The ME device doesn't show up in Windows device manager or lspci, so the ME firmware updater from HP doesn't work. Ctrl-P does nothing at boot. The flash descriptor override key combo (Win Left Right) at boot doesn't work on this machine - power lights blink for a split second and the machine powers off (the same key combo does work on my girlfriends Probook 6460b). Has the key combo has changed for the 7-series?

Anyway, I'm unable to use FPT to dump the full contents of the flash chip or flash any replacement. I've got a dump of the bios and flash descriptor, but of course the descriptor is read only. I'd love to try the hda pinmod, but this board has a different audio chip than the examples I've seen (IDT 92HD80B1X5), which I can't seem to find a datasheet for.

What are my options at this point? I could try and return the motherboard, but it was half the price of any other. I don't have a Raspberry Pi to use for flashing, but I do have an Arduino Uno and a Teensy kicking around here if one of those could be used. I don't mind soldering on this board if necessary, but I'm not very programmer-centric (did a little C in school, but that was way back). I could try and remove the bios chip from the old motherboard and put it on this one, but I don't know if that'd cause any problems, especially since that board has ATI graphics and the new one has Intel. I can pick up a busted 8470p tomorrow that might help me a bit, but I dunno.

So I ended up swapping the bios chip from the old motherboard to the new one, and the MEI still doesn't show up, where I know it worked in the old board. Same bios version each time. I'm really at a loss for what to do at this point. Since I've swapped with a known good chip, is there any point in getting an SPI flasher going?

Incidentally I did end up grabbing the broken 8470p on Sunday, and now that I've replaced the SATA connector on it's motherboard it works great.