Thank you for the detailed report. Yes, that "error 1: unknown" is what we were getting as well at the ASRock board. So at 1.6 beta 1 the clean (RGN) 1168 worked whereas the dirty (EXTR) 1168 did not. Interesting. I think that's the same thing we were seeing at the other boards. FWUpdate 1160 is probably problematic. When (and if) I find a clean (RGN) 1171 firmware I will ask you to test it. If it succeeds then indeed FWUpdate v1160 is problematic and only accepts RGN and not EXTR images for some reason. We'll see. For now, thank you again for your input jjxaker.

Lordkag explained it to you.

Your system has a chip "called SPI" and includes (among other things) the BIOS. Your BIOS file (SPI image actually) is provided by ASUS and is used to program the SPI chip with data.

The BIOS you have from ASUS has ME firmware 8.1.2 inside. So when you first flash this BIOS, your ME is 8.1.2.

Afterwards, you updated the ME Firmware which is inside the SPI to 8.1.65. So now your SPI chip has the ASUS BIOS flashed but with a newer ME firmware.

The BIOS from ASUS cannot magically change to contain the newer ME firmware.

Example: You open the water faucet and put clean water inside a bucket. Then you add dirt inside the bucket. Would the water from the faucet be dirty as well? You contaminated the bucket but not the faucet. The faucet = BIOS image whereas the bucket = SPI chip. The BIOS image cannot have an updated ME Firmware since you only updated the SPI chip with the new data.

Do you understand what I'm saying and what lordkag tried to tell you?

Now, FITC is a tool. Flash Image Tool is used to create an SPI image (let's say ASUS uses that tool to create your BIOS which is not very accurate but will do). The information of which FITC version was used to create the SPI/BIOS image is left at the ME Firmware. That's what MEA reads as FITC. If ASUS or you, used for example FITC v8.1.52 to create the SPI/BIOS image then MEA would report FITC 8.1.52. It has nothing to do with the actual ME Firmware. The latest BIOS from ASUS was generated with FITC 8.1.2 and so that information is shown by MEA.

Bottom line: Your SPI/BIOS chip has ME firmware 8.1.65 inside. The BIOS image from ASUS still has the older ME Firmware inside. The BIOS image from ASUS was build using the tool FITC v8.1.2.

* Intel ME 11.0 Corporate PCH-H Firmware from v11.0.0.1166 (24/07/2015) --> v11.0.0.1168 (05/08/2015)
* Intel ME 10.0 Corporate 5MB Firmware from v10.0.45.1024 (17/06/2015) --> v10.0.46.1002 (14/07/2015)




Note: The next version of MEA will be released in the next three days.

@ bicalov:

I will have time to check your reply tomorrow probably. Make sure you have proper MEI drivers installed first (download and install "Intel MEI Drivers & Software v11.0.0.1162 for Corporate systems complete package" from section A2 of the first post).

@ jjxaker:

Yes, for now MSI is updating the ME firmware regularly. But that won't last long and the fact is that FWUpdate 1160 (and possibly other 1160 tools) are buggy and not working properly. Hopefully we will find something newer soon. Just FWUpdate would do for now since noone can update without using special methods.

@ bicalov:

Now that you installed a proper MEI driver, can you run MEInfo and MEManuf tools and report back with the results? I'd like to see what these report first. Remember that you need the tools for 7.x firmware.

@ sfektsz:

Why do you want to restore to older firmware? It shouldn't be required. What firmware did you have before and what now?

First, do a clear CMOS and then restore default BIOS settings. If the problem persists, run Flash Programming Tool with command fptw -d SPI.bin . Does it report Error 26 or does it dump a file called SPI.bin? If the dump succeeds, please compress and attach it here.

Why did you change the chip? Did HP send it to you? Did you have this problem before changing the chip? Did the problem occur after updating the BIOS or changing anything else at the system?

Do the DOS versions of MEInfo and MEManuf report the same errors upon running them? Use MEManuf -verbose this time. Also, while at Windows, it's better to use the x86 versions of the tools since the ME7 x64 ones were not always reliable.

@ bicalov:

The bad news are a) Your Flash Descriptor is locked and thus we do not have write access to full ME Region and b) HP does not include the system-customized ME Region at their BIOS updates. However, we might be able to fix this by making sure you have the latest BIOS and ME firmware up to date. Especially the latter might be the cause of the problem.

1) Make sure you have the latest BIOS from HP installed. After updating to it, restore settings to default.
2) Update to the latest ME7 5MB firmware which is Intel ME 7 Corporate 5MB Firmware v7.1.86.1221. Use FWUpdate for that.
3) Reboot and check if everything is ok.

I found THIS while searching for your issue. I'm thinking that updating the ME firmware might fix it.

@ eroder:

Yes, the 11.0.0.1160 tools are buggy. Especially FWUpdate does not seem to work when it comes to updating or downgrading firmware. It can only reflash the same firmware version at it's current buggy release. We need to find new tools first.