Hello, I used to have a working ASRock MB. I started researching to have it optimized since I experienced performance issues. I ended up here reading about all this stuff like MEI update, SATA updates and stuff. I tried many of the tools from here but most of them return with an error message in the command window. I think the only one that came up with some useful answer was some analyzer tool telling me the MEI version on my system. Dont even remember since I tried so many of them.
To make a long story short: another user obviously managed it to successfully upgrade his system. We messaged a bit back and forth. Since he was able to update his system I was kinda motivated to give it another try. I again tried the MEI update but the same result - error message. The tool stopped working, at least thats my impression since there was only a red error message in the DOS command window. I deleted all this useless junk and shut the machine down. Later a buddy gave me a call whether I am up to game a bit. Turned power back on and the only thing I see is a lil white dot in the middle of the screen.
Either a working machine just broke due to some failure that I dont know or some of that intel update crap did something in the background.

Question: Any chance to get it back to life or do I have about 300 Euro of electronic junk in my tower?

Updating Intel Management Engine Firmware on X79 boards, especially ASRock, is a very bad idea.
I have an ASRock X79 Extreme4 and the MEI firmware is 8.1.40.1416, about 1.9 MB big.
And here comes the surprise: the firmware size should be 1.5 MB. They use some special customized firmware.
Standard firmware sizes are 1.5 MB and 5 MB.

You should be able to recover using the ASRock Crashless BIOS feature.
From what I read, you only need an USB flash drive connected to an USB 2.0 port on the ATX panel.
It must be formatted as a FAT drive and only contain the BIOS file.

ASRock BIOS files contain the Intel MEI part, so in theory it should work as long as the BIOS version you want to
flash is newer than the one that is stored in your mainboard.

Yap, first things first. The MBs name can be found in the header. It says ASRock X79 Extreme 6. I tried to update the MEI from what I have to Intel ME 8 Consumer 1.5MB Firmware v8.1.52.1496. The version I had is 8.1.40 something. I downloaded the newer version from here and as well tried what I got from another guy. The command FWUpdLcl64.exe ME-firmware.BIN in the DOS prompt results to Error 8716: Invalid usage.
fptw64.exe -BIOS und -P filename.bin is resulting to Error 200: Invalid parameter value specified by user. Use -? option to see help. filename.bin is obviously not what I typed in. In this case it was the name of the modded BIOS file I got from another user who has the same MB.
I should mention that I did run the command prompt as an administrator.
FWUpdLcl64.exe and fptw64.exe is stuff that I downloaded from this forum here.
The only tool that seemed to work was the ME Analyzer tool which gave me the same MEI version as I had in my BIOS.
Not sure if this issue can be recovered since I only have a black screen (beside the lil white dot in the middle) and keyboard is dead or locked or whatever to make it into the BIOS. There is not even a summary screen anymore.
Like I said before, I am not sure what really happened. Its hard to believe that my attempt to update MEI or the BIOS broke the board since those magic tools all came back with errors but who knows. Last thing I did was messing around with those before I kinda frustrated turned the machine off.
I already found an online shop that sells BIOS chips with recent BIOS on it. I think I will go down this road first since its only about 10 Euros for the chip. If this will do the trick then I will leave it like that -> lesson learned. Its simply to much hassle just for the sake of having whatever lil performance boost (if there is any)

The recovery has already been patched here for the same board, but I'm not sure the user will succeed in updating. From what I see, is the classical case of running the tools with every command but the right one, breaking the system and then blaming the tools. I always wonder when I see such cases if the user is trolling or just had a really bad day.

My take is that he flashed a BIOS with a capsule, given he said he used "... -BIOS ...". I remember there was a problem when using FPT with capsuled files, not sure if this is valid for all FPT versions.

Any news on this?

the board works with stock bios.

I asked a friend, who has a programming device, for help, pulled BIOS chip, successfully loaded the stock BIOS, put chip back in, turned computer on, enjoyed a feeling of happiness that is working. I will not touch this again, at least not this mainboard.