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Flash Bios with ch341a

Cypher^64

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Soooo.... *blushing* a couple weeks ago I messed up flashing the bios on my Eurocom M5 Pro (Clevo P650se) and bricked it.

A gent on the notebook forums whose helped me with unlocked bios and vbios mods said I need to get a ch341a with clip and he'd help walk me through fixing it. Unfortunately he seems to be MIA.

Anyone have any experience with this?
 

zoob

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Do you already have it and the clip? And disassembled the laptop to access the bios chip?
 

KaptCrunch

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reason MIA that bios chip is soldered to MB and ch341a is a pin type programmer '

ebay pre-programmed chip but need special tools to de-solder and re-solder chip


unless your very good with hands to piggy back ebay bios chip on MB to boot up then remove the Ebay chip then reflash MB chip

note piggy back is stack chip in same correct position, notch or dot
 
Last edited:

moocow

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The only experience I have is re-flashing the BIOS on my Chinese tablet. The BIOS chip is surface mounted and the clip constantly slip off. I end up getting a SOIC8 spring loaded pogo connector which also doesn't fit since my chip wasn't SOIC8. End up slicing the connector in half and inserted a popsicle stick to widen the connector and rest the pins next to the chip pads to re-flash. If there's a place that offer motherboard repair, may be buy the new chip and pay them to replace it.


https://techtablets.com/forum/topic/unbrick-x98-pro-bios-usb-flash/


https://www.amazon.com/SOIC8-Spring...rds=pogo+pin+connector&qid=1549683282&sr=8-17



Be warned, some BIOS chips are lower voltage and using the equipment shown in the link above may burn out the BIOS chip.
 

KaptCrunch

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Be warned, some BIOS chips are lower voltage and using the equipment shown in the link above may burn out the BIOS chip.


12v to reset chip making it blank data, this why you remove the booter chip once system is up an running then proceed to reflash

piggy-back no power just parallel connection
 
Last edited:

Cypher^64

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Turns out flashing it was pretty straight forward, the clip was a little finicky to get on such a small chip but no biggie.

Unfortunately it's not the bios, it appears to be the EC. Oh well. Guess time to part this thing out.
 

KaptCrunch

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embedded controller is sometimes known as a "Keyboard Controller BIOS", which comes from the fact that the embedded controller evolved from the keyboard controller and often still is used as a keyboard controller. Even today, an ACPI embedded controller communicates with the CPU by using the same I/O ports that keyboard controllers used in the past.

so replace the KB chip or is it a broken trace on motherboard
 

zoob

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What BIOS version did you go from and to with the clip flash? You need to make sure your new bios is compatible with the version of the EC otherwise it will fail to boot.
 

Cypher^64

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What BIOS version did you go from and to with the clip flash? You need to make sure your new bios is compatible with the version of the EC otherwise it will fail to boot.

I tried flashing back to the original from an unlocked and that's what caused the issues. Using the programmer I did try the original and the unlocked on that was working (before I screwed up)
 

Cypher^64

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so replace the KB chip or is it a broken trace on motherboard


Did look into replacing the EC, but that doesn't look like a fun job. For the amount I was going to sell it for not sure if it's really worth the effort. I did look at getting a new bios chip, I do have a friend that said he should be able to do it, but again, just didn't seem like it was worth that much effort.

The guy that is helping me with the flashing has 1 more idea I'm going to try, if that doesn't work, I'll pull the ram and ssd and if anyone wants the laptop, they can have it.

Thanks for all the help everyone, I greatly appreciate it.
 

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