Ivy Bridge support for Lenovo Thinkcentre M71e

[Lolucoca]

It's not real dump.
I've found one dump by myself.
Try to flash this mod to 8MB flash chip and solder it.

I've put it onto an MX25L6406E flash chip which is just the 8MB version of the one that was on there and it's still encountering the same issues. It doesn't boot, regardless of whether I use the i5 3470 or the i3 2100. There's no image on the screen (doesn't matter if I'm using the integrated video output or a dedicated card) and there's no keyboard initialization. I tried switching the Intel ME jumper link but the behavior doesn't change.

[DeathBringer]

No more ideas.

[Lolucoca]

Yeah, same goes here. Lenovo has apparently managed to really lock this down, intentionally or not. There's no reason this shouldn't work as it's basically the same board. I'm not sure if it's got something to do with it being two memory chips on the same SPI bus and some sort of addressing weirdness, no idea. Would it technically be possible to just erase Sandy Bridge functionality and replace it with the Ivy Bridge microcode?

[DeathBringer]

Adding microcode doesn't add support for new CPUs.

[Lolucoca]

Adding microcode doesn't add support for new CPUs.

You're right, I wasn't thinking. Seems like this board is going to be Sandy Bridge only, I've had this computer apart for probably six or seven times already and the pads on the motherboard are starting to give from being soldered onto a good dozen or two times (I've tried to get it to work before posting the thread in here). Thanks a bunch anyways, I feel honored that you took time out of your day to help me!

[nikey22]

You're forgetting about the ME Region!

Firstly, the OEM (in this case Lenovo) would have to create a IVB-capable BIOS/UEFI for this to work from their engineers.
I'm guessing that they already did, because the M72e platform has this and works with ivb cpus, and that the motherboard is close enough to yours.
That's one part of the puzzle, and a big one, because without Lenovo making an IVB capable BIOS, this will never work.

The Sandy bridge CPUs are mated with Intel Mangement Engine (ME7) and the IVB CPUs use ME v8. When Lenovo went to IVB CPUs, they had to change the ME version to 8. There is no way to 'field' upgrade generationally to ME 8. Meaning, you can't do it via software means. But that doesn't mean you can't mate a ME8 with ivb-bios. It's quite simply actually if you know how to manipulate the BIOS regions.

Interestingly, your m71e.bin bios doesn't have a PDR region or a Gbe region, I wonder if those are on the other chip.
Also, you have a locked descriptor, so for sure you will need to use hardware programming for this.

Also interesting, the m71e.bin uefi/bios region itself is only 2,560KB in size. Whereas the m72e.bin uefi/bios region is about double that size. So I'm sure when they went to the m72 motherboard, they must have included a 8MB chip instead of a 4MB chip. Its a good thing you have a 8MB chip.

[DeathBringer]

You're forgetting about the ME Region!

I didn't forget it. I used ME Region from M72e in my mod.

[nikey22]

@DeathBringer, do you have a link to your mod? I can't get the one from googledrive. Thanks, I'll have a look.

[DeathBringer]

I've deleted it as useless.

[nikey22]

I've deleted it as useless.

so just to be clear, you had a full spi.bin image dump from a m72e?