help needed: Managed to kill BIOS

[mahlzeit]

OK, so some time back I asked for help regarding removing the whitelist for a Yoga 2 13. I received some help from a user here but when trying to flash the BIOS I encountered errors. Everything seemed to work fine afterwards until I restarted the computer. It greeted me with an error message that no operating system was detected (don't have the accurate wording right now). When entering the BIOS it sometimes detected my hard drive and sometimes it didn't...but never was I able to start the system.

I then tried to flash the BIOS with a cheap SPI programmer (CH341A) and a software that didn't officially support or detect my chip. This is when I really messed up. After that my computer went completely dead. Pressing the power button lights up the power led for a second or two and that's it. Screen does not come on, fan doesn't spin, no sound whatsoever.

By now I have flashrom running on my Raspberry PI and when I flash with that everything looks OK. Flashrom detects my chip correctly, erases, writes and verifies. Unfortunately the result is the same....laptop won't start.

One thing I noticed is that flashrom gave a warning that the bios file size did not match the chip size (file was smaller). So what I did is that I filled the end of the file with zeros. In that way I tried to flash both the bios dump that I created before I started this whole adventure as well as the modded bios file that I received from the helpful user. Neither worked.

I then also downloaded the current BIOS from the Lenovo support page and extracted the executable. I found a .ROM file which was too large (roughly 9MB instead of 8MB) so I just "cut off" the end of the file and flashed it. Results unchanged.

Does anyone have any idea what else to try? Is it correct to just fill the end of the bios dump with zeros to bring the file size to 8MB?