Hey there, Forum!


I've recently found myself in a bit of a pickle.

I bought a couple of good motherboards (ASRock H61M-DGS) with corrupted BIOSes and got a couple of damaged H61M-DGS with non-corrupted BIOSes. Since that motherboard has a socketed BIOS, all I did was remove the corrupted BIOSes and replaced them with the good ones, and both motherboards came to life. Flashed the BIOSes with my own UBU-updated ones, and everything went smooth.

However, I lost the Intel ME data (?), I can't upgrade the ME Firmware because it says ME doesn't exist in the system. I tried following the guide (FITC with clean dump) to fix it but it didn't work. Unfortunately I don't have access to an SPI Programmer so everything has to be done via software. Bear in mind I flashed the BIOS using ASRock's Instant Flash utility inside its BIOS.

My only question is: would that affect the motherboard's normal operation? I haven't encountered any unstability so far, but since I'm selling both motherboards I want to be sure it won't compromise the system's stability.


Thank you!

Alright, Forum ... I was able to fix the entire thing.


Maybe this wasn't the place to post this, I should've posted it in the Intel Management Engine sub-forum since the issue was a corrupted ME Firmware. Maybe someone can move it there. Here's what I did to fix it.

First, using MEInfoWin64 two errors popped up ...

Error 9458: Communication error between application and Intel(R) ME module (FW Update client)
Error 9459: Internal error (Could not determine FW features information)

After reading this guide, this guide, and not having an SPI Programmer ... I had to resort to the HDA_SDO/GPIO33 (a.k.a. "Pinmod") method.

Since the HDA Chip is small enough to make first-timers a little nervous ... I taped the metal wire from a twist tie to a chopstick and adjusted it until both ends of the wire were exactly on pins 1 and 5 of the HDA Chip







Booted the PC right up, used FPT to make a dump of the BIOS, no Error 26 popped up.

Opened the dump in FITC, followed the guide steps for my specific scenario, verified that everything was in order ... flashed using FPT with the command fptw64 -f bios.bin followed by fptw64 -greset

It worked beautifully, in both motherboards. After rebooting the PC, device manager showed the Intel Management Engine Interface, I was able to load the driver, and update to the latest version of the 8.1 (1.5MB) Firmware.

Checked everything afterwards with MEManufWin64 and the result was successful.





Hopefully this will help someone else in the future.


This forum is immensively resourceful, honestly.

Thank you, all.

@Punkster Sanders - great you were able to find solutions and fix this issue yourself! And thank you for taking the time to come back and drop all that info for others to use in the future too, surely someone will find and appreciate it someday!
Please edit your posts title to more reflect the ME issue too, and then I will move this into the ME forum section for you, that way others searching later may find easier.

@Lost_N_BIOS - Done, mate.