Problems? See this thread at archive.org.
Hi there,
A bit of a background first, if you want to know what I need skip to the end.
I was foolishly messing around with my SVS1311(P9EB) bios in an effort to get my modded IPS screen to work. It seemed to be a firmware connectivity issue since the backlight worked and was controllable. Everything else checked out ok.
I found a bios dump of R0140C5 and tried to flash it. Insydeflasher gave an error that it may be missing EC so I looked into it and found that it might be possible to modify the dump rom to match the newer ones. So I did what was suggested, removed the "zero-hole" or some "padding" to make it exactly the same size and since the ending parts vere identical I gave it a go, thinking it wouldn't flash a bad rom without error.
Everything looked fine, insydeflasher recognized it as R0140C5 and started flashing. No errors. So I shut down.. hopefully not for the last time. It won't boot up.
Guess I learned my lesson, don't play around with the bios if you don't absolutely know what you are modifying. So the keyboard lights up, blinks off and lights up again. Power leds come on. Keyboard backlight responds to touch. After a while, it shuts down. If powered on enough times, the fan comes on as well.
Apparently SONY in it's wisdom has removed the emergency recovery part of their insyde bioses, so usb-flashing methods won't work.
What I need to do instead is find a flashing method for my chip. It's a Winbond W25QCV(ST6). A possible method here(with a simple usb-to-chip cable) and here(with some wires, components and soldering required).
Suppose either of those or some other connection method works and can talk to the chip after I've desoldered it off the MB. That is where my knowledge ends. I have no idea what to flash to it. I'll need to use the flashrom program but I'm probably right in thinking that it's not going to be as easy as just flashing the .ROM update from the downloaded bios. I do have a 8192kb rom dump from a r0140c5 bios that I'm going to assume would work for the sake of hoping for the best. Still, no idea what to do with it. I have read about a ME sector that I would need from my original rom and that the bios has an unique identifier tied to my MB but that's all I know. No practical knowledge to put to use.
I imagine others have been trying to recover their bricked vaio's at some point. My model is a SVS13 but probably there are some universal tricks that I and others should be aware of?
Thanks, would love to have a happy ending to my mistake instead of needing to order a new mb.
Sony bios recovery
Discussion in 'VAIO / Sony' started by Jaguar, Jan 6, 2015.
